Detective In Conan's Shoes
by 4fireking
Summary: The story of a seventeen year old turned into a little kid. He starts his adventure as a kid in Teitan Elementary School solving mysteries for his dad. As the days go on and the search to find Vermouth increases, he discovers his father isn't as good as he seems. (co-author Kaede Tsukino).
1. Chapter 1

**I don't need to remind you that this story was written by two authors. 4fireking from fanfiction and also fictionpress and Kaede Tsukino. I'm not very good at the mystery genre but my partner is. All mistakes I made he was able to correct. Since this is an OC story we have to give information about the OC before writing the story. Here it is: **

**Name: Yoru Kurihara**

**Gender: Male**

**Age: 6-7 years old, but is actually 17 years old**

**Personality: A sensible person with a good sense of justice. He dislikes troublesome things and can't stand annoying people. He's not afraid to speak out his mind either and can be very blunt too. Occasionally says things that seem insulting but means no harm. Sometimes sleeps during classes.**

**Background:**  
**As the son of a detective and the director of a hospital, he inherited his father's deductive skills and his mother's knowledge of the medical field. He often works at his father's detective agency part time to help out. He usually serves the clients tea or coffee and snacks. Despite only helping out, his father gives him assignments that he deem too boring to handle like finding a lost pet or helping the police find some bank robbers. His father never lets him handle murder cases since he didn't want to ruin his childhood but somehow most of the cases he gives to him turn into murder cases. His mother often yells his father for putting their son in such dangerous situations and threatens his father with syringes. Despite that, they are a close loving family.** **But one day, Yoru was given a case by his father to investigate the mysterious letters an idol has been getting. The notes told about getting back what was taken from them. The case was resolved. Yoru found the perpetrator who was. The perpetrator was a jealous idol who used to be classmates with the idol and couldn't handle being inferior to the idol so she just wanted to scare the idol. However, the idol was manipulated by the Vermouth to act as a distraction from the police as she went to retrieve an important disk that came into the possession of the idol by accident. Vermouth had an underling take the disk back, but he was caught by Yoru. The underling was an executive of the talent agency the idol came from. He shot Yoru several times and used the poisonous drug APTX 4869 (the same drug that was used on Conan/ Shinichi and Ai/ Sherry) on Yoru and left him to die. The man makes a call to Vermouth saying that he retrieved the disk. Vermouth told him to meet up as scheduled. He was later killed by Vermouth. Having turned into a child, Yoru had no leads on how to return back to normal, but he did have a lead to the ones who turned him into a child. Before the disk was taken, Yoru read through it. In one file he found, he saw the pictures of Conan/ Shinichi, Ai/ Sherry, and Ran. He remembered seeing Conan/ Shinichi in an article of about him being Kaito Kid's rival. He transfers into Teitan Elementary School with the purpose of finding out Conan/ Shinichi's connection with the people who turned him into a kid.**

**Skills:**  
**Like most detectives, he has a logical and sharp mind. He is skilled at in multiple areas like medicine, sports, and self defense.**

**Please read and review **

XXX

Being a detective is about more than just having a good memory. It's not about making guesses either. It's about using logic. The detectives are nocturnal creatures—working at night and sleeping in the day. Some detectives are inspired by fiction, non-fiction, and tragic memories. Detectives do the work God never does...help people and making bad people pay.

In an all boys boarding school there was a young smart boy named Yoru Kurihara. Yoru was a sensible person with a good sense of justice. He dislikes troublesome things and can't stand annoying people. He's not afraid to speak out his mind either and can be very blunt too. Yoru was dressed in his school attire but his hair had red streaks in his natural black hair. His eyes are blue.

Yoru was at no fault. He never did anything bad to this school, and yet he was expelled from his school...at least he was going to be expelled. Today he had a science test and a student who always had something against Yoru, Mizu Kuzumi, dropped a sheet near Yoru's table. The sheet was the answers to the test and it was in Yoru's handwriting, forgery of course. But no one believed Yoru when he said it wasn't his.

One week later, not being able to go to another school for three months, Yoru was forced to help out at his father's detective agency. Then after transferring into Teitan Elementary School, Yoru watches Conan/ Shinichi from afar before deciding to make his move. He keeps minimal interactions with Conan/ Shinichi to avoid suspicion. He gathers information about Conan/ Shinichi and listens in on conversations about the famous Detective Boys. Ayumi sees that Yoru is always alone and feels sorry for him and feels that Yoru is similar to Conan/ Shinichi. During PE, the boys are playing soccer. Yoru is on the opposing team of the team Conan/ Shinichi is on. Yoru proves to be on par wtih Conan/ Shinichi which surprises Conan/ Shinichi. Genta and Mitsuhiko invite him to hang with the Detective Boys after school so that they could ask Yoru how he was able to play against Conan/ Shinichi who was the best in their class when it came to soccer. On their way to Professor Agasa's lab, they run into a murder case. Yoru was going to solve the case until Conan/ Shinichi dives in first. Yoru sits back and decides to let Conan/ Shinichi handle it. Conan/ Shinichi becomes wary of Yoru when Yoru subtly helps out. Yoru is suspicious of Conan/ Shinichi due to his vast knowledge that no elementary school kid should have and concludes that Conan/ Shinichi is just like him a person who turned into a kid due to the drug that was forced onto him.

Then one day a pretty woman walked into the office. She was tall, skinny but not slender, wearing a red dress and a white coat. She had red makeup and black sunglasses. She wore a hat that looked exactly the same as her white coat. She was a client.

Clients were hard to find in a detective agency, but to Yoru's father they started coming in like cars in a parking lot. On slow days Yoru would see eight or ten people showing up with their cases. Some were trying to sue, some were police officers asking for help finding bank robbers, and others were old ladies looking for their lost pets. All of those cases were boring, Yoru never took them. What seemed different about this attractive lady was her holding a folder. A letter slipped out of the bag, but she caught it and slipped it back in her folder. Yoru worked as someone who gave tea and snacks. To the clients he was just a cute little kid trying to help the clients through a bad day. No one knew he was the detective of the agency. He approached the attractive lady.

" Would you like some tea, ma'am?" Yoru asked.

"What a cute child." The woman patted Yoru's head.

Although Yoru knew she was only being nice, it didn't bide well with him that a woman was calling him cute. _'I'm definitely going to find the antidote.'_ was what Yoru was thinking.

The woman and Yoru's father start talking about the case the woman came in for. The woman revealed herself to be the wife of the president of a famous company who had been receiving threatening letters. The woman was worried about her husband so she wanted Yoru's father to find the culprit. Yoru's father accepts the case and takes Yoru with him.

There they find another letter this time stabbed into the door to the president's office.

" **Read this letter well because it is the last one you will get. By now you know there is no loyal fans only a loyal husband. I wonder how long he will stay with trash like you when I show him all your darkest secrets. He might even have read this letter and is showing it to you right now. I'm hoping that happens, but I'm not that lucky. Don't think any amount of money you give me will change what I will do to you. Either you tell your husband what happened to your last one or I will make the people you don't want to know see it. Your friend the Cheshire Cat Two."**

Yoru's father folded the letter and put it in his coat. It was to be used for evidence because of finger marks. " If this letter was put here by someone in the building we can just look at the tapes and-"

" No. Look at the camera." Yoru pointed at a camera sticking out of the wall. It was covered in a plastic mask of the cartoon Cheshire Cat. " They knew there was surveillance there so they put a cat mask there."

" So the person sending these letters could be working at the presidents office? Is that what you think?" Yoru's father asked.

" Maybe. Tours are also taken when the president is away. Maybe someone who was taking the tour did this. People who take the tours normally don't take it more than once, so we should ask for footage of the camera of anyone who took the tour twice."

"No, little boy, you should leave this to your father. Children shouldn't play around in adult matters." The woman told Yoru.

Yoru was peeved to be treated like a child even if his appearance was one.

The woman takes Yoru somewhere. "There's a lovely nursing room for cute, little children. You can play with the children there until your father finishes his work."

Before Yoru could protest, the woman had already taken him out the room and through the hallways.

_'Guess, I'll leave it to Dad then.'_ Yoru tries to think of a way to change the woman's mind.

"Oh my, what do we have here?" A woman with black hair tied in a bun and wears rimless glasses appears before Yoru and the president's wife. She is the president's secretary. "I didn't expect to run into you here. And I see you even brought a child with you. Not some illegitimate child you had behind the president's back, I presume?"

The president's wife turns meek and quiet as she felt uncomfortable seeing the president's secretary. Yoru notices this.

"I'm looking for my daddy but got lost. This nice lady found me and told me she'd help me find daddy!" Yoru puts on the innocent child facade. "He's always working and hardly plays with me."

"I see, but your father is a working adult. It can't be helped. He's working very hard for your sake." The secretary kindly advises Yoru acting completely different towards Yoru compared to how she talked to the president's wife.

'Except, he's the one pushing his work on me.' Yoru internally retorted.

"I'm sure one day he'll find time for you. After all, he genuinely loves you unlike a certain someone I know who fools around." The secretary says as she takes her leave.

Yoru slipped away and found his father taking the tour. He looked like he was about ready to fall asleep, but he willed himself to stay awake. Yoru walked up behind his father and tapped him on his shoulder.

" Why are you taking the tour, Dad?" Yoru asked him.

" I tried finding someone who took the tour twice like you said but all the surveillance cameras picked up were people doing by once—families, friends, girlfriends and boyfriends, retired people and old people—none of them took the tour twice and none of them looked like they were paying attention."

" I can't believe I'm saying this, dad, but maybe you were right about the person working at the office." Yoru put two fingers on his chin and rubbed them thoroughly. " It would have to be someone with lots of clearance. Someone who can get by and no one would notice them."

" Like him?" Yoru's father pointed at a chubby guy with short black hair and big frame glasses walking by with a card on his right shirt. He was drinking a cup of coffee.

" Not him, dad. It would have to be someone taller because a short person would have to carry a chair or ladder to block that camera and there's cameras in every room in the presidents office."

" What about her?" He pointed at a women who was tall, had long black hair and small bangs, red lipstick, and amber eyes. Yoru could smell her perfume from here, and it smelled like something girls use when they try to get men to notice them. She also had one button open from her suit revealing her cleavage.

" Not here either. She doesn't have the clearance to get to the presidents office."

" You're right. We had to ask one of the guards to take us there."

" He's also too short to put it there. The person we're looking for didn't jump to get to the camera. They stood under it when they put the mask on...unless."

" What is it, son?"

" What if they were wearing something that could make them get taller. You need to look at that video footage again."

As per Yoru's instructions, his father went to the security room to check the footage but learned that it was erased.

Meanwhile, Yoru was doing some investigating of his own. He searched the area but found nothing until he found a diamond earring in a large potted plant near the security camera near the surveillance camera. Yoru has a clue as to who the culprit might be. He takes out his magnifying glass and checks the ground underneath the camera and finds nothing.

_'Nothing. Not even an impression.'_

Yoru goes out to find his father. On his way, papers start flying over him.

"Oh no, I'm so sorry." A woman with long wavy brown hair tied back apologized to Yoru as she picks up her papers.

Yoru helps the woman with her papers.

"Thank you for helping me. You're such a nice child. I need stop with all these careless mistakes. And just when I got promoted too." The woman pouted.

"Promoted?" Yoru inquired.

"Yep, I may not look like it, but I'm the new manager." The woman proudly declared as she puts on her usual gentle smile.

"You?" Yoru sarcastically remarked. He found it hard to believe that a klutzy woman like her is capable of managing anyone.

"How rude! I'll have you know that I've been in this company for three months and already got promoted to manager in no time."

_'Three months...'_ Yoru made sure to keep that information stored in his mind.

"Hey Miss, do you by any chance know who this belongs to?" Yoru takes out the diamond earring he found in the potted plant. "Someone lost this. I'm looking for the owner."

"This is.. !" The woman was surprised to see the earring. "This belongs to the president's secretary, Shimizu-san. (Full name: Yumi Shimizu)"

'The president's secretary...' Yoru takes note of that.

"Yes, you see. I heard this earring was from a pair of earring that the president gave to Shimizu-san after a year since she took over the secretary position. She used to wear them all the time but recently stopped wearing. If I recall, normally, she takes good care of them, but lately she's been careless with them. She even accidentally left them in one of the offices."

Yoru processes all the information he received and stores them inside his head.

" Thanks again for helping me pick up my papers," the manager smiled.

" You're welcome," Yoru said.

After she left Yoru ran to the surveillance room to see how his dad was doing. He had so much to tell him. The secretary was his number one suspect. Yoru knocked gently on the door. The door didn't open. Yoru banged on the door again but nothing happened.

" Dad, it's me. Please open up."

The door swung open but Yoru backed away before it could hit him. He walked inside that building and found his father putting his head on his arms and sleeping.

' _Jeez dad, can you not do the simplest things?'_

However, this was not his father sleeping on the job. He looked at the surveillance cameras...they were nothing but static. The tapes that were beside the screens were missing. Could Yoru's Dad really do this? He knew his dad wouldn't do something like this on purpose. Yoru stepped on something sharp and in a line. He looked down and saw he was stepping on a door to the vents.

' _Someone must have snuck in here and stole the tapes,'_ Yoru thought.

That wasn't the only thing he noticed. He noticed a baseball bat laying on the ground. But the tapes were already erased when Yoru's dad checked them. He reported it to the president's security and they got new tapes to record the messages.

Yoru processed the information in his mind like a computer downloading new files. He played everything back in his head: the letters, the mask, the erased tapes, the secretaries earring, someone wiling to hurt his father just to find some tapes. It didn't make sense...

" I got it," Yoru snapped his fingers. " The secretary was doing in a something in a room she couldn't avoid so she had no other option but to destroy the tapes. Whatever she did she either didn't do it right or forgot something that could tie her back to the scene of the crime. She had to destroy the tapes or someone would have suspected she would be the blackmailer."

" Yoru?" Yoru's father was starting to get back up. He felt like a hangover, his head hurting and him being unable to remember what happened. " What happened?"

" There's no time for that, dad. We have to find Ms. Shimzu-san."

"The secretary?" Yoru's father didn't have the slightest clue why her. The woman was a diligent worker and quite pretty too. She didn't look like someone who'd do anything bad. "Don't tell me you think she's the culprit! That's not possible. She even brought me some snacks."

"Snacks?" This caught Yoru's attention.

"Yeah, she brought me some cakes."

_'Cake!'_ Yoru checks over the air conditioner duct where the culprit had supposedly entered through from. He sees four screw holes. One on each corner of the shaft. Then he checks the metal exhaust hood he stepped on. He found four screw holes on each of the corners matching up with the shaft's opening. He looks over the ground to find four screws on the floor.

"Hey Dad, were there any other people who came in here?"

"Yeah, the client and a nice lady."

"Did they give you anything? And do you remember the order they came in?"

"First, it was the secretary who offered me some cake. Then the nice woman, she poured me some tea. Last was the client. She gave me some wagashi."

_'Cake. Tea. And sweets.'_ Yoru ponders on the thought of which one it could be until something caught his attention.

*sniff* sniff*

Yoru smells something in the air.

"Lavender?" Yoru recognized the smell as lavender.

"Oh, that must have been from the nice lady. She had on the sweet scent of lavender on her."

'This fragrance... It's familiar.'

Yoru then recognized the lavender scent as the same scent he smelled from the manager.

"The secretary. The manager. And the client." Yoru muttered. "Those are our suspects and likely the culprit behind the case too."

"Eh? The secretary and manager I understand, but the client?" Yoru's father questioned.

"Yes, she's a suspect too. We can't overlook any possibility. She might her agenda for doing so which is why we can't exclude her either. There have been several cases where the client used a detective to clear their name."

Yoru's father couldn't argue at his son's reasoning.

"The ventilator didn't show any signs of forced entry and could only be opened from the outside. Likely, that the culprit left it open to make it look like they came through the ventilating shaft. The bat was probably used a diversion from the real method that put you to sleep. Chances are that you consumed some kind of sleeping medication in one of the three you consumed. Now the question is who the culprit could be?"


	2. Chapter 2

**This took time and effort to write and my friend Kaede Tsukino So I hope to get at least one review for us writing it. It's a two part case because not all stories have to be long. The end of this case is not the end of the story so don't think we are finished yet. Thank you and have a nice read. **

XXX

Time was most unkind to Yoru today. He was standing in the security room wondering which of the three suspects might have drugged (not beat with a bat) his dad. Right now he was thinking of what might have motivated them to commit this crime.

Hatred maybe. The presidents wife was in the idol business and people in the idol business would do anything for money or good publicity. Maybe she would do this so people would feel sorry for her and she could feed off their sympathy and ask for things to help her " get over" the threatening letters.

Blackmail was another option. When someone sends hateful letters that say their going to "expose" them for what there's always a "or you can send" sentence that tells them they want money. What was complicated about these letters is Yoru didn't see a message like that in any of those letters.

There were too many motives. It could be someone who hated their client. Someone who is mad in love with their client (even though the suspects are girls) trying to get her away from her husband. It couldn't even be someone who wanted revenge against their client. All this thinking was hurting Yoru's head. It also hurt before all this thinking because Yoru didn't have anything to eat since the investigation started.

" Dad, do you have any more cake?"

Yoru was normally such a diet freak. He wanted to keep in shape...being out of shape would make him unable to fight people who pick fights with him or chase people trying to escape a crime scene. Yoru was just so hungry and would eat anything right about now.

" I have a piece with a bite taken out of it, but I think it might be what has the drug in it."

Yoru had an idea come to his head. It was so obvious. He had to test these foods to see if any of them still had the drug inside it. " Can you give me the tea and wagashi as well?"

" I'm sorry, son. I drank that cup of tea and ate all the wagashi." Yoru silently cursed in his inner thoughts. Every good idea he has is either gone or distracted by his father's own buffoonery. " Look, Yoru, I think you should leave the security room. We've already seen most of the crime scene—what more is there to look for?"

"The suspects' themselves. And I'd like to look more into the relationship between Shimizu-san and the client." Yoru remarked as he had a feeling that there was more to their relationship that meets the eye.

"Make yourself useful for once and test the cake for any drugs or sleeping medication." Yoru deadpanned.

"How mean!" Yoru's father whined as he cried.

Someone knocks on the door and enters.

"Excuse me, Mr. Detective." The client comes in. The moment she shows up Yoru immediately hides and gestures his father not to give him away since the client would probably take him away telling him that he shouldn't be interfering with his father's work. "My husband would like a word with you."

The client looks around thinking she saw something.

"Was there someone else in here?" The client asked.

"Nope, just me. Now about your husband." Yoru's father slightly pushes the client out of the room keep her away from Yoru. "We can't keep him waiting."

Once Yoru's father and the client leave, Yoru comes out his hiding place and goes out to find more information for their investigation. He'll let his father handle the client and see what information he can get from her and possibly her relationship with Shimizu while he looks for more clues to the case.

His first priority should be to find Shimizu and ask her questions. He can't help but find the whole thing odd. If the culprit was smart enough to drug his father with some sleeping medicine and make it look like someone had knocked him out with a bat. Then why was it that the earring found in the potted plant. It was way too suspicious and any good culprit would never make such an amateurish mistake. It looked more like it was placed there on purpose.

Caught deep in his thoughts, Yoru overhears a couple of female employees chatting with each other. One of them had brown hair and other with blonde hair.

"I can't stand it! Why do we have to work with such a stick in the mud!" The brown haired woman complained.

"Same here. That Shimizu-san is really so strict. I made one mistake and she yells at me for a ten minutes. Then tells me to redo the whole thing." The blonde huffed.

"I know right! She's the complete opposite of Kaneko-san." (Manager's full name: Megumi Kaneko)

"She even helped me refill the paper for the printer in my place."

"Just because she's the president's mistress. She thinks she's better than us."

"Shhh!" The other woman shushes her partner. "That's only a rumor. We don't know if it's actually her."

"Oh, please. It's so obvious that it's her. Who else could it be? I mean why else would she act like she's better than us."

"Well, technically, she is. Although her character is very problematic, she does her work very diligently even before all those rumors about the president's mistress came out."

"And when was that?"

"I think about two or three months ago."

"Still doesn't change the fact that I don't like her." The brown haired woman declared.

She wondered why her coworker was so quiet all of a sudden.

"It doesn't matter how you feel about me as long as you get your work done." Shimizu who appeared behind the brown haired woman informed her.

"Shimizu-san!" The brown haired woman turned around to see Shimizu behind her.

"Your break has been long over. If you have time to mindlessly gossip over ridiculous rumors, then you have time to work." Shimizu pushes up her glasses causing a sharp gleam to sparkle.

"Yes! Madam!"

Both of the women scrambled and left the vicinity.

"And as for you, children shouldn't be in this area." Shimizu walks over to Yoru.

Yoru didn't know why Shimizu didn't get mad at those ladies for badmouthing her. If someone was talking to him like that he would show them. He would show them what they said about him was false. Shimizu was escorting him back to the office. They passed a secretaries house with a vase full of flowers that looked like wildflowers.

" Shimizu?"

" What is it?"

" I'm just curious why you didn't get mad at those ladies for badmouthing you? They called you problematic."

" It's nothing new to me." She said that but stopped and looked away from Yoru. "Things have always been like this for me. I worked very work to get to where I am and they had plenty of chances of getting where I am but they blew them. "

Yoru was surprised by her answer. Sure she worked hard, but did she even enjoy working here? Yoru enjoyed detective work. It wasn't everything like Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, or the Hardy Boys but it always paid off when Yoru finished a case. The ending was always dramatic, like when he gets to announce the culprit, and then see their denial. His father represents Yoru's report and ends the case. That boy Conan in his class—the genius—he hoped they could work in a case together.

Yoru asked Shimizu a question. " Why don't you quit working here if you don't like it?" Shimizu acted like a proper lady giving Yoru her answer.

" This job may lack entertainment, but before any of this there's someone I care about very deeply. He's in this company. I don't care about this company. I don't care what other think of me."

Shimizu was more resolved than Yoru originally thought. It was good to see a woman who could sacrifice something for someone other than herself. It was a shame though that she had to put him in a waiting room and his father had to pick him up.

He was there for five minutes. He was thinking hard about the case. He was wondering why the culprit wanted those tapes. Thanks to his incompetent father there was no way he could solve the mystery figuring out which of the deserts had sleeping agents in them. He had to look at the case in a different angel.

_' Now that I think about it, wouldn't the culprit only need one surveillance tape; the tape from the president's office. Why take all of them...'_ Yoru felt something tickling his nose. Somehow the pollen from the secretary's desk got into his nose. Yoru let out a big sneeze as tiny droplets dripped over the wall. After wiping the water out of his nose an idea popped in his head. ' _The picture of the Cheshire Cat. The culprit had a mask…we wouldn't see their face. There shouldn't have been any point to all this unless they had some kind of a reason. The best reason is the reason that cannot be found. What's in the office?'_

Yoru needed to powerwalk. He walked through the office, avoiding the attention of the lady who told him he shouldn't be walking around here. Yoru walked by one room, stopped. He saw on the wall a clock with the second hand ticking by.

' _Time? Was it time? Could the culprit have taken them all in a hurry?'_

"Shimizu-san, do you by any chance have a record of all the people who come in and out of this room."

"Why, yes, I do... I always keep track of the company's activities including those who enter this room be it an appointment or for an errand. But why do you ask?" Shimizu didn't see why a child would want to know that.

"The lady I was with before asked me to."

Not seeing the harm in letting Yoru see, Shimizu takes Yoru to her desk and shows him the records of the people who come in. Yoru scans through the file and found what he was looking for.

"Thanks, Shimizu-san." Yoru thanked the woman. He found the culprit, but the only problem was that he lacked evidence.

Then something caught his eye. He saw a large brown stain on the nice carpet.

"What's that?" Yoru points to the large brown stain.

"Oh some careless idiot accidentally spilled coffee on the floor. I thought he already cleaned it up by now. On top of being incompetent, he foolishly allowed his child to play baseball inside. The kid even broke a window. Naturally, I gave him a severe scolding for his foolishness. Although I had him take his child to the nursery, I had to put the baseball bat away in the security room as a precaution."

Now the pieces were starting to fall into place. Yoru runs off to the printer. He saw a stack of unopened printer paper by the printer. He then opens the paper compartment where he finds a new stack of printing paper there. This was just as he suspected. Yoru looks around and sees a small trash can near the printer.

"Children, shouldn't play with trash!"

Searching through the trash despite Shimizu's protests, Yoru found the piece of evidence he was looking for. Now all that was left was to gather up the suspects and unveil the truth behind the threatening letters.

Yoru was waiting inside the president's office. As per Yoru's instructions, Yoru's father gathered all the suspects in the scene of the crime where they found the letter, outside the president's office. Yoru's father soon walked in with the three suspects. First the client walked in, followed by the managed, and the secretary who was fiddling with her fingers.

" Why did you bring us here?" The secretary asked nervously rubbing her fingers together.

They were all confused as why Yoru's father called them there. Yoru played his part. He handed his father all the evidence he compiled through their search, now all he had to do was waiting on the desk and see how he presented information given to him by him.

" Ladies, you are all here under the suspicion that one of you is the culprit sending threatening leaders to our client."

" You idiot!" The client yelled. " I'm the client! I told you to solve this mystery, not blame it all on me!"

" Exactly. You're not the killer. I brought you here to show you who wrote you those letters."

" Oh? Thank you." The client's face was red in embarrassment as she coughed into her left elbow. " Carry on then."

" Thank you." Yoru's father pulled out the notes written by his son. He only showed them the front side because the backside had what he should say. " Megumi Kaneko, how long have you been in this company?"

Megumi started to look suspiciously to the ground. " T-Three months."

" Thank you. I am looking for someone who has known the president for a long time. Someone who was close to the president, maybe even too close. Three months…that's around the time all the rumors of the president's mistress came out."

" That doesn't mean anything!" Megumi argued.

" It does mean one thing. If my (his sons) suspicions are correct the person is…" All three of the girls leaned forward to hear. Yoru paid attention, but only turning his head to the left. Yoru's father pointed at one of the girls and shouted their name. " Megumi Kaneko, the manager of this company."

There were gasps between Megumi. Megumi's eyes widened when she was accused. Yoru looked at his fingernails and breathed air.

" That is an absurd accusation," the manager said getting all uppity about it. " I have done no such thing and have no reason to do so in the first place."

" I also agree with Megumi," said Shimizu. " I find it hard to believe that she was threatening your client."

Yoru's father paused, looked at the back of his paper and continued in a way Yoru would speak if he was the one explaining it to them.

" I have to tell you otherwise. She has more than enough reason to harass our client with her threatening letters."

" What makes you think that?"

" Because…Because…" Yoru's father was losing his train of thought. He couldn't look at Yoru's paper because all the women were looking at him expecting an answer out of him. It finally came to him. " You are the president's rumored mistress."

The manager was shocked to hear Yoru's father's words.

"That should be more than enough reason for you to want to threaten our client."

"How cruel, Mr. Detective... You're singling me out just because of a coincidence." The manager starts to tear up.

"No, I assure you, Kaneko-san. You are by definition not being singled out. I admit that your work ethnic is quite impressive, however it was nothing remarkable compared to Shimizu-san whose work could easily promote her to any position in no time which leaves the question..."

The manager starts to feel uncomfortable as Yoru's father continues to talk.

"How on earth did you achieve your position in such a short amount of time?"

"Th-That's because I worked hard for it. I put in a lot of effort to get where I am! You can't accuse me of being a criminal just because I was trying my best!" The manager rebukes.

"It's true that effort and hard work is what earns people their positions. However reality is not so kind. No matter how much sweat, blood, and tears you put in, if your results aren't good, your efforts are meaningless."

"Then in that case, wouldn't Shimizu-san be the most suspicious out of us?" The manager declared pointing at Shimizu. "Isn't it suspicious how dedicated she is to her work?"

Shimizu was shocked to see that the manager was doubting her and thought that she was the culprit.

"Kaneko-san, how long have you been in the company?" Yoru's father asked changing the topic.

Not sure what that had to do with anything, Kaneko just answered Yoru's father's question, "About three months..."

"I see..." Yoru's father takes in the information he received. "Isn't that around the same time the rumors of the president's mistress came out?"

The manager's face pales as Yoru's father continues on.

"If the mistress had been Shimizu-san, then the rumors would have come out earlier."

The manager regains her composure.

"I see your point, but that's just pure coincidence."

Feeling a slight tug on her skirt, the manager looks down to see Yoru.

"Ne, ne..." Yoru innocently says. "You forgot some papers in the hallway. Don't worry I put them back on your desk. But I found something strange."

Yoru holds out video tape more specifically one that looked like the video tapes from the security room.

" What my son is holding is a video tape of someone stepping on a coffee stain. Chances are the first few sheet of paper got stained with coffee." Yoru shows the papers he found in the trash with a coffee stain. One of them had an imprint of a high heel on them.

" What's that suppose to prove?" Shimizu asked.

" It means the client who came to us couldn't be involved. Shimizu either." Yoru's father was so convincing. No one would know that Yoru told him beforehand. Yoru even knew their reactions. " You knew about the coffee stain and made sure to avoid the spot. This makes the manager the only possible culprit."

The manager was biting her nails. She was starting to feel nervous about him. Yoru's father walked up to her and stared at her. " You were also the one who knocked me out. Not at first however. You originally intended to use a light sleeping drug in my tea to put me to sleep."

Yoru plays the video tape and watches it as his father interrogates the manager.

"But unfortunately, for you, Shimizu-san came beforehand and offered me some cake. And after your arrival, our client gave me some wagashi. Thanks to the sugar in both of the sweets, I managed to retain my consciousness, but that was a problem for you. For you were pressed for time, therefore had no choice but to takes matters into your own hands. Fortunately for you, there was a bat inside the security room that was placed there by Shimizu as I heard from my son. Using it, you knocked me out before I could finish watching over all the videos. Then used the screwdriver from the security room's tool box to unscrew the screws on the air vent to make it look like it was done by an outsider."

"Can you prove that!" The manager desperately rebuked. "Can you prove that I had a motive for knocking you out? For stealing those tapes? How can you be sure that it was me? Someone could have put the tape on my desk to frame me! So I wear high heels big deal! So does everyone woman in this company!"

Yoru's father could see that the manager was getting desperate. She was practically already confessing that she was the criminal.

"Hey, what's that?" Yoru said as he pointing at a scene on the video.

The scene surprised Shimizu, the client, and most of all the manager. They saw the president, the client's husband, making out with the manager in an empty conference room. Shimizu was the first one to react as she covered Yoru's eyes so that he couldn't see anymore. That was not something a child should be seeing.

"Nothing, to do with you? I beg to differ." Yoru's father taunted.

"Ke... Ke... Hehehehe..." The manager starts to giggle.

"Kaneko-san?" Like the client, Shimizu was puzzled by the manager's strange reaction.

"Fine, I admit it. I am indeed the president's mistress, Mr. Detective." The manager admitted.

"Finally, some truth." Yoru's father said.

"But that does not prove that I am the culprit. While it does prove I have a motive, but that's about it. Unless, you have evidence that I actually did it. You can't prove that I'm the culprit based only on a video of our private affairs."

"Being a mistress is enough proof that it couldn't be anyone else but you."

"So I'm a mistress. We all have our own dirty secrets that we wish to keep hidden. You, Mr. Detective, are no exception."

Yoru's father flinches a bit but goes unnoticed by the manager who continues.

"I'm sure even you too have at least one or two skeletons in your closet."

"That's right, Dad." Yoru said agreeing with the manager. "It can't be her. She's too nice to do it."

Yoru's father didn't get what Yoru was doing by siding with the manager when he knows for sure that she's guilty.

"After all, if she was the bad person, then she would have coffee stains on her shoes. Since the bad person was using the printing paper as a stand."

The manager's face pales.

That's it. Yoru's father got what his son was trying to tell him.

"Then Kaneko-san, I hope you don't mind removing your heels and show us whether or not you're truly innocent." Yoru's father knew what it was. It was her heels. Since the culprit stepped in the coffee stain, there should be some stains left or at least some left for them analysis. They are also likely to left a faint scent of coffee on them.

Kaneko-San was more than willing to take off her heels and showed them what was beneath her foot. It was the same coffee stain they were looking for.

" It was me all along," she confessed. " I was the one who sent those blackmail messages to your client. I am unimpressed at how unintelligent she was to not know it was me." She chuckled lightly. " Congratulations for figuring out it was me, detective."

" Why...?" The client let out when she learned who the blackmailer was. " Why were you sending those letters to me?"

" How about letting the detective solve it himself. That's what we are here for, listening to the detectives theories and finding the blackmailer. If you know its me does that mean we can leave."

" You knocked me out and stole the tapes because there's a tape that would have exposed you as the blackmailer."

"That's right. I was careless. To think I would have been exposed like this was a miscalculation on my part." The manager chuckled.

"But why?" The client asked.

"Why?" The manager repeated with a hint of annoyance.

"Why!" The manager yelled out. "Because you had everything I wanted. I didn't care about money or position. I just wanted his love, but you already took that from me. No matter what I did I couldn't get his attention not even as his mistress. I was only his plaything while loved you from the bottom of his heart. Something I could never obtain no matter how hard I tried. I even tried to work as hard as Shimizu but I couldn't do it. She was perfect. She could get anything done or whatever she wanted without any effort at all."

Envy is a terrible thing. Admiration and adoration could easily turn into jealousy making them lose their way.

"You're wrong." Shimizu spoke as she held a melancholic look on her face. "My results were not from my hard work or dedication but from my pain and sorrow. I wanted to forget about everything. My pain. My grief. And my lost love."

The manager saw it in Shimizu's eyes they were the eyes of a brokenhearted woman. She knew that better than anyone in the room for she saw the same look in her eyes every time she looked in a mirror. The pain of losing your love was too much for any woman to bear.

"I guess. We were not so different after all." The manger gently smiled.

Yoru had to get out of the room. Why he left was to call the police and tell them everything. They didn't believe a kid like him until he played the tape that was hidden in his jacket. Any minute the police would be running in to put the manager in jail.

Then the manager was taken by the security guards to be handed over to the police. But not before asking Yoru's father one last thing.

"Why didn't you think Shimizu-san was the culprit? She hated your client and acted rude to her. Not to mention, your kid found one of her earrings in the plant near the camera."

"Because she cared for her friend..." Yoru's father answered.

The manager wasn't expecting that answer.

"A woman who's willing to accept the harsh treatment of her coworkers all for the sake of her friend even after losing her love to that friend... How on earth could such a woman be capable of threatening her precious friend..."

The manager's mouth slightly hung open until she closed it again. And then continued her way to the police station.

"I still hate that woman, and I don't regret what I did one bit." The manager said as she is escorted out. "But I do regret involving a fellow heartbroken woman in this... I pity her for having such a sad fate."

And with thus came an end to the sad brokenhearted tale of a woman who lost her love.


	3. Chapter 3

**I hope you enjoy the new case me and Kaede Tsukino came up with. It took some time but that's because we write our hardest. My health has gotten worse so I hope I'm able to complete this story. **

XXX

One week later, Yoru and his father are at his father's detective agency. Yoru is breezing through his homework while his father goes over his mail.

"Hey Yoru, guess what." Yoru's father shows Yoru a picture he got from one of his previous clients.

Yoru stops doing his homework to see the picture of Shimizu and their previous client at a beach for the client's photo shoot. On the letter attached to the picture that read "The divorce finally got through!"

" It's funny," Yoru said. " The only happy thing people talk about in married people's lives are their divorces. I don't pity her husband at all."

" We did a good job together," Yoru's father said patting Yoru on the back. " I couldn't have solved that case without you."

" You couldn't solve any of your cases without me," Yoru replied holding his fingers out. He pulled them in and out to add ten cases they solved together. Every one Yoru solved. He was happy they were over, but none of them was getting him any closer to turning back into his older self.

" I know I make you work hard, Yoru. But if you didn't help me with these cases who else could have solved them. And you know I'm worried about you. Every time we go on a case I'm worried some bad man is going to take you hostage."

" Bad men have taken you hostage more times than me," Yoru said making his father almost fall down from embarrassment. " And every time someone has waltzed behind me and taken me hostage I get out on my own."

" I know I'm not the father who can protect his son no matter what, but if someone would hurt you I would arrest him. If someone kidnaps you and places you on another island I would find you. Even if you were born any different I would still love you. Can't you see I'm trying to take care of you?"

XXX

Yoru could not believe his father was taking the entire family, his aunt and uncles and his cousins to the botanical gardens. It was after he got home from elementary school. During elementary school Yoru was trying to beat Conan at who could answer the most questions and who could do it faster.

After school ended, he heard Conan and his friends talking about a famous botanical garden though it was mostly Ayumi, Genta, and Mitsuhikko talking while Conan and Ai were talking about something else.

Conan Edogawa. A boy who demonstrates knowledge beyond what most kids at his age would know. His high intellect caught Yoru's attention after he enrolled into Teitan Elementary. He was someone that Yoru had to keep an eye on no matter what. Something inside him tells him that there's more to Conan than meets the eye.

Then on his way back to his father's detective agency he met an unexpected scene that even he could not predict.

"Pack up your bags, Yoru! We're leaving!"

He certainly could not predict that his father would say something like that.

"Did your business fail already?"

"What! How could you say something like that to your old man! I'll have you know that my detective agency is flourishing quite well! Thank you very much." Yoru's father boasted. "I'm always getting new clients and customers!"

"No thanks to me, you idiot of a detective." Yoru deadpanned.

" As I was saying before I was rudely interrupted." Yoru's father waved his hand as Yoru rolled his eyes. " I found this great place we can spend our time. It's called the botanical gardens. It's in the country side and it is famous for its exotic flowers. I want to see the Iris japonica."

" A botanical garden? But I was planning on patrolling the night to see if there were any cases." Yoru said back to him.

" What kind of father would I be if I just let you go out in the dark and look for people who want to hurt you?" Yoru asked which was more sarcasm because he let him go ten times.

And that was how it all started. Yoru wondered if his mother was going to join them. And when he asked, his father instantly paled at the mention of his fearsome wife. Yoru's father had told him that Yoru's mother was busy with work so she couldn't make it. Understanding his mother's busy work schedule, Yoru didn't inquire any further.

"So what made you decide to go anyway?" Staring out at the window, Yoru nonchalantly asked his father who was driving.

"Nothing, just wanted to spend some quality time with my cute son who's always helping me out." was all Yoru's father answered, but Yoru knew there was more to it than that.

"Sure. Sure. I believe that as much as I believe in Santa Claus and Bigfoot." Yoru's words ooze with sarcasm. "If anything, I bet it has something to do with mom."

Yoru's father flinches at the mention of his beloved yet scary wife.

"She probably said something among the lines of 'You never gave him a proper childhood by making him solve all those traumatizing cases of your's in your place. And now that he's a child, you should at least give him the proper childhood you never gave him now while he's still a kid.' And then she proceeded to kick your sorry butt out."

Knowing his parents, that probably what happened.

"Haha..." Yoru's father lightly chuckles at his son's accurate scenario except for one thing. "You're wrong about one thing. She kicked me out after I said, "You're always working so you never gave him much of a childhood either." Then she said, "Don't you dare talk to me like that, you lazy bum. If you don't take him somewhere away from those bloody murder cases, I'm divorcing you on the spot and taking Yoru with me.""

Yep, that sounded like his mother alright.

"That's why Yoru... For your old man's sake, please at least look like you're enjoying the whole thing..." Yoru's father said to his son with tears raining down from his eyes.

" Okay Dad...I'll do it for both our sakes," Yoru said in the same way his father said it. He too was scared of her anger.

Yoru's father smiled and pat his son's shoulder. " That's my boy."

XXX

Yoru was doing all the things he should do when his family went on a vacation. The first thing was putting everything that gave him joy away in his drawer or closet. The next thing was getting a camera for the vacation. It was a regular camera because anything that distracted him from the trip, smartphones or cellphones, were not allowed. Taking pictures was the only thing that was allowed.

Looking at the beautiful nature scene, Yoru could tell that the place really did live up to its name. The only thing that would make it better is if his father would shut up.

"Hey Yoru, didn't I tell you this place'd be amazing! It's fine if you want to praise your daddy once in a while. Why don't you say something already?"

The constant chatter from his father irked Yoru to no end. Making their way to the lobby, Yoru asks a female staff worker where the botanical garden is.

"It's not too far from here. Just about 30 meters down the hiking trail. If you need any assistance, I'll guide there if you'd like." The female staff worker said while smiling.

"Really? That's be great." Yoru's father blushed at the sight of the female staff worker's smile although it was more directed at Yoru than him since she liked children.

"What are you blushing for?" Yoru questioned the blush on his father's face.

"Botanical garden?" A man sarcastically remarked. "Just some over sized flowerbed. Sure doesn't live up to its reputation. You're better off looking at some random flower on the sidewalk."

Around the man's neck was a camera.

"Excuse, dear sir. Please refrain from speaking of such things." The female staff worker pleaded.

" Anything for a pretty girl like you, he said sounding like he wanted to pick her up. He didn't sound like a sleazbag trying to pick up girls because he was drunk. He just sounded like he was being nice. " Can I speak my mind outside this garden?"

" Of course you can. But if you talk like that in here and I'm around I might lose my job."

" How about I tell you more about the flowers over diner?" He just gave the weirdest pick up line Yoru ever heard. The staff member looked offended by him and walked up.

" Sounds like he is a little screwed up in the head," Yoru's father joked whispering it to his son and elbowing his shoulder.

" Whatever," Yoru said. He didn't know why people did silly things. Maybe they thought they could get away with it or maybe they thought nobody cared what they did. " Let's go somewhere else before we go to the lilacs."

"I want to see the lotuses first!"

Yoru heard a familiar feminine voice from behind. That wasn't the only one as he recognized the next voice along with the other's.

"What's so good about those?" Genta complained. "Man eating plants are more interesting."

"No way. I wanna see the pretty lotuses. One of the nice ladies told me that the lake near here has pretty lotuses growing out of it." Ayumi firmly held her ground.

"Now that I think about one of the employees did tell me that if a man and a woman gaze at the lake during a sunset they will be blessed with eternal happiness together." Professor Agasa remembered a female worker with long black hair telling him that.

"What?!" Both Genta and Mitsuki yelled out.

"Then in that case, we have to go there right away!" Genta shouted out.

"That's right!" Mitsuki yelled in agreement.

"Except that the sunset won't be coming out until hours later." Ai deadpanned much to Genta and Mitsuki's embarrassment.

Despite all his years of solving cases, he never would have thought that he'd meet his classmates in a place like this. It was a good thing they hadn't noticed him yet. Things would just get complicated if they find him. He can't let them know that he's there too. Although they were classmates, Yoru hardly interacted with anyone so he doubts they had any recollection of him. He made sure not to leave any kind of impression that would draw any unnecessary attention to him.

"Hey, isn't that Kurihara-kun!" Ayumi pointed to Yoru.

It seems that he thought too soon.

"Kurihara?" Genta repeated the unfamiliar name as he didn't recall anyone by that name.

Ayumi and Genta followed Yoru. It was too late not to bring attention to himself. Yoru deduced their young age followed by their curiosity was what made them follow him. Yoru didn't know if they were spying on him or wanted to invite him to see the flowers with them. Yoru didn't really care what they wanted. He was only knew he wasn't really the same age as them and even when he was that age he was still much smarter than them.

Ayumi got in front of Yoru. She looked at him with her blue eyes. She looked at his face and for some reason she looked down at his shoes. Yoru was surrounded by her friends Mitsuki, Genta, and Ai. Yoru knew they were more than just friends; they even had a name for a club they were part of. Yoru didn't care to ask them what the name was.

" You are Kurihaha!" She exclaimed. Mitsuki and Genta were surprised and happy to see him. Ai was looking at Yoru with an evil smile on her face. Yoru always knew there was something different about Ai than the rest of them. At times he felt she might have something to do with his now young age. Yoru was going to ask her questions, but Ayumi wouldn't stop talking. " Hi Kurihaha-kun. Want to spend time with us?"

" Why don't you spend time with your parents?" Yoru deadpanned her. " Their the ones who pay for you to see the garden."

"Stuck up guy..." Genta grumbled, not pleased with Yoru turning down Ayumi's invitation. "Let's just go ahead. We don't need to go with this rude jerk."

"We didn't come with our parents. We came with Professor Agasa!" Ayumi clarified for Yoru.

Yoru didn't understand why five children were out in a place like this with a professor rather than their own family. He must be close to them for him to take them to a distant location like this. He was probably a neighbor of one of them or something.

"He's really nice and takes us to lots of fun places like this. He even took us to eat sushi one time and took us camping a few times."

_'Yeah, and all of them ended up as murder cases.'_ Ai internally retorts.

"It'll be fun! I'm sure you and Conan can get along really well!"

"Conan?" Yoru feigns innocence. He had already known about the detective prodigy Conan Edogawa. It was hard not to know about him considering how odd his name was.

Conan Edogawa, a transfer student like him. And like him, he was much more intelligent compared to his peers. From what he's heard, it seems that Conan has been solving numerous cases and even helping out the police in their work and many other achievements. Yoru had never interacted with Conan before, but he could tell that there was something different about Conan compared to the other students. The same goes for Ai Haibara. The air around her was different from rest of the kids in their class.

Suddenly, Yoru heard screaming. It sounded like two women screaming together. Sure enough his father came running towards him sweaty and out of breath. He saw the little kids near Yoru and feigned a smile.

" Hi kids," he said. The girls were still screaming but

Ai sighed. " I knew this trip would turn into a murder case."

At the edge of the lake was the drowned corpse of a middle aged man. And not just any middle aged man. It was the man Yoru just met about half an hour ago. Just exactly what happened in the half hour he hadn't seen him for him to have died just like that, but that could wait till late.

Immediately as soon as he saw the body, Yoru checked the man's pulse to see if he was still alive. However it was no good. The man was already dead.

"He still alive?" Yoru's father asked.

Yoru shakes his head in sorrow. No matter how evil or corrupt one may be, it is never a good thing to see one's death.

Yoru checks the man's corpse to see if there was anything that could have caused his death. He wasn't the only one as Conan on the opposite side was doing the same thing.

"Were you two the first ones to find the corpse?" Yoru asked the two ladies who were scared by the appearance of a corpse in this beautiful nature scene.

"Y-Yes..." One of the ladies, Sakura Hanabusa, who wore a cherry blossom hair clip answered. "It was our shift to water the plants in the botanical garden... On our way, we saw a guest fishing in the lake, but he seemed to have had trouble pulling in his reel. We assumed that his hook might have got caught between some stones or debris so we assisted him, but when we managed to pull it out. We found this..."

Sakura looked down frightened by the discovery of the body.

"And where is that man who was with you?" Conan asked.

"He went to get a doctor. At first, we thought he had simply drowned so he went to get a doctor while we performed CPR but when we tried to feel his pulse..."

She didn't need to say anything else since they could already guess what happened next.

" He was already dead." Yoru finished for them. " I'm guessing it was trauma to the brain. After the murderer killed him he or she threw him into the water. Nice try, murderer."

" Son, don't talk like that," Yoru's father said. He moved his son's head so he could see that a lot of people were murmuring about him and pointing their fingers at him. Yoru forgot he was only a seven year old boy. " A man just died. Try to act a little more...shocked...maybe a little scared like your seeing his body for the first time."

" I am not in a circus, dad. If they don't like how I'm acting they should open up a newspaper because we are in the twenty first century. Kids are sayin words younger and younger. They just don't know why their doing bad things."

Conan finished his investigation. He walked away to the rest of the little kids who were his friends. Yoru wondered if he had new leads about what the autopsy report would say so he tried talking to Conan.

"It's most likely that the murder tried to make it look like he drowned by knocking him out and setting him adrift on a row boat. If anyone had passed by, they'd just assume that someone didn't tie the boat by the coast. After awhile, the boat would sink along with the man making people think he simply drowned." Yoru explained to his father.

"But how would the boat sink? Most boats are designed to float. That's the whole point of it." Yoru's father questioned.

"If it was rigged to sink, then it'd sink. Just one hole would be enough to capsize a boat especially with a human body in it."

"Then how are you sure it's murder. Couldn't he have just taken a nap and didn't notice the sinking boat?"

"Would someone taking a nap in boat be tightly holding onto flower petals in his hands?" Yoru shows his father a flower petal that he found while inspecting the corpse.

"What!" Yoru's father exclaimed in surprise.

"Normally, when someone drowns, they immediately wake up upon contact with water especially considering the difference in temperatures. If he drowned like you said, then he would have woken up when the boat was starting to fill up with water. It's like throwing a bucket of cold water on a sleeping person. And if he had woken up and realized that he was drowning, he would have had those flower petals in his hand."

Yoru had a point. Yoru's father couldn't deny that. Usually, when a person drowns, their palms are free of anything so that the victim could swim to shore or grab onto something that could help them.

"The only way he could have drowned while holding onto these flower petals would be that he died beforehand in a place that had these flowers and then set up to look like he drowned."

"I see!"

Yoru walks up to the two female witnesses.

"Excuse me, Miss? Do you know where I can find this flower? I saw this earlier when I was with my dad, but I forgot where it was." Yoru asks putting on his false child persona.

"Why this is our famous iris japonica..." Sakura recognized the flower as the botanical garden's most famous flower. "Isn't it, Ayame?"

The other female witness, Ayame Sakurai, meekly nodded in agreement still not fully recovered from the trauma of seeing a drowned corpse.

" Ayame, I need you to speak to my about this next question. The flower may be the key to finding this killer. Besides your exhibit is there anyplace else with cameras that sell that flower. The flower is one clue to the murder. Another is motive or hate. "

"No." Ayame shakes her head. "The iris japonica can only be found in the flowerbed cultivated in an area in the botanical garden."

"Can you take us there?" Yoru needed to confirm the meaning behind the flower. Exactly for what reason did he hold onto that flower.

As per Yoru's request, Ayame reluctantly guided Yoru and his father to the iris japonica flower field. She held mix feelings in this whole ordeal. A person just died and not just one but two kids were acting like detectives.

Wasting no time, Yoru goes over the flower field with a fine tooth comb not missing any small detail that will prove detrimental to the case. So far he hasn't found anything out of the ordinary. That is until he comes across a human shaped imprint left in a section of the flower field. Based on the shape and the crushed flowers, this was where the murder was located. The location was quiet far from the botanical garden and hardly many people making it the perfect place to plan a murder without witnesses. But the question rose, how did the murderer transport the body from the iris japonica flower field to the lake?

"So you found a clue..." Yoru's father said to Yoru.

"Yeah... Now that we've determined the scene of the crime. Next up are the alibis of the three people at the scene of the crime. We have yet to see the last person at the scene. The one who fished the man out of the lake."

But finding alibis was going to be hard for Yoru and his father. Those kids from the elementary school he went to were asking everyone about their alibies before Yoru. It hurt Yoru's head and made him angry that people were doing his job. That's if it were under normal circumstances.

Normally, it'd be frustrating when he does nothing while someone was doing the case instead of him. It hurt his pride as a detective.

But right now, there was something more important than his pride at the moment. It was finding out Conan's abilities. Other than Yoru, he was the first to react to the corpse found at the lake. To have reflexes as fast as that, only detectives like him could react instantaneously like that. Hearing the rumors of Conan, Yoru had his suspicions about Conan. Now was the time to verify those suspicions. He'll leave them be and see how things develop on their end.

Based on the information he got from his father, the only ones without clear alibis were Sakura Hanafuda, Ayame Sakurai, Renge Seika, and Sayuri Kaben. Both Sakura Hanafuda and Ayame Sakurai are employees. They are both close friends and have been since childhood. Along with Sayuri Kaben, they tend to the flowers. Sakura Hanafuda is in charge of the green house while Ayame Sakurai tends to the flowers outside of the green house. Sayuri Kaben is in charge of the area around the lake as well as managing the lake and keeping it clean and pristine. Like them, Renge Seika is a guest at the inn as well as a regular patron of the botanical garden. He comes from a long line of flower arrangers. His family is quite famous in the field as well. He has been a regular visitor as he seeks inspiration from the flowers here and even uses them in his arrangement boosting up the botanical garden's business. Sayuri Kaben was the lady Yoru and his father recognized as the female employee harassed by that reporter. Like Sakura Hanafuda and Ayame Sakurai, she is a staff member as well. According to the rest of the staff, she seems to hold a grudge against the reporter for ruining her parents' business. Unable to coop with the stress, both of her parents are hospitalized. Now she works at the botanical garden to pay off her parents' hospital bills and earn enough money to support herself and her sister.

She wasn't the only who held a grudge as the others too were resentful of the reporter.

This was why Yoru never wanted to be a reporter. Reporters used to writer stories about how drugs were ruining the world and the mistakes the government made, but all reporters talked about now was celebrity scandals and how people were dying and no one is doing anything. If Yoru wanted to write about things that were affecting the world he would write a book about it.

It seems that botantical garden and inn are both owned by Sakura Hanafuda's parents and has been in their family for generations. However nearly went under after a negative review from that reporter. Sadly, her mother passed away during those hard times after she became neurotic from the stress and worked herself to death trying to bring their once thriving business back up. Her father became stiffen with grief and distant to everyone around him including his own daughter. It was only recently that they finally managed to get back on their feet.

And even before the botanical garden fell into hardships, Ayame Sakurai had been working alongside her childhood friend's side and has been a veteran employee for more than 10 years since she was 15. When the reporter came to the botanical garden, he made a lot of passes on the female employees especially the younger ones. Ayame Sakurai was no exception. After Sakura Hanafuda's father asked him to stop harassing his employees, the reporter wrote a bad review on the place mostly filled with lies saying how the service was terrible, the flower were artificial, and how shoddy the inn was just to spite them.

Renge Seika, the heir of a famous family of flower arrangers, too faced many hardships due to the reporter. After he gave a negative review on the botanical garden, it became hard for him to concentrate on his work after seeing the place he liked so much go out of business because that bad reporter. He was so brokenhearted that it affected his works for a while. The reporter even took that chance and made a demeaning review on him saying how talentless he was and how his family's business was going to end with him.

Yoru had a tough job to do. He didn't have time to have any fun on this job. The first part of the case was always the tough part where he had to go from stuff that doesn't make sense to the stuff that does make sense. His father got the easy jobs but made it look like he was doing the investigation.

Things were getting tough. All four of them have some kind of motive to kill the man. The question was who? Sayuri Kaben and Sakura Hanafuda both have the strongest motives. However he couldn't rule out the other two. In Sakura Hanafuda's case, it would be most suspicious for her to commit murder on her own family business since she's the one most familiar with the layout.

_ 'I doubt anyone would dare commit murder in her circumstances. But with that reporter around, it wouldn't be unlikely if she got backed in a corner. Sakura Hanafuda and Sayuri Kaben aside, the other two were suspicious as well and could have committed the crime at any moment. Well, that's all they got from the rest of the staff. Now onto the interviews with the suspects._'

Starting with the successor, Ms. Sakura Hanafuda.

" Why do you bring your son along for this interview?" Sakura asked Yoru's father. Yoru made sure his father was around for the interview. Besides being older Yoru's father bared something that made him easy for the interviews.

" I know it seems weird, Ms. Hanafuda, but please understand I brought him here without his mother, friends, or even a nanny. I can't just leave him all alone in a crime scene. It would be chaotic. I hope you can understand that." Yoku's father was good at telling lies. It must have been because he had some practice with it. The truth was Yoku's father wasn't afraid of Yoku getting lost. He needed him to solve the mystery.

" Very well. I am fine with you taking care of your son. I just don' t want him to ask me questions about what happened here. He's a kid, he has no right to ask questions about the crime scene." That sounded a little rude but Sakura was right. Yoku wasn't going to have any of his questions answered if he was the one asking them.

Yoku's father continued the investigation. " I'm a detective, ma'am. I'm not at liberty nor can I say I believe you are the one who committed this murder but for references I need to ask you questions that might make you feel uncomfortable. First question is where were you when the murder took place?"

"I was with my dear friend, Ayame. After I finished checking the green house, I ran into Ayame while I was checking up on the other areas. She asked for my assistance since she needed help to carry some equipment and gardening material."

"Help?" Yoru inquired.

"That's right. There are lots of flowers blooming around this season not just our iris japonica. She's having a hard time maintaining all of them. Also for the flowers that bloom, we make our own flower arrangements and put them in pots so we can sell them in our shop for our tourists as souvenirs." Sakura Hanafuda explained. "And while we making our runs, we met up with Ren... I mean Seika-san who was out fishing. It seemed as though his hook got stuck between some rocks so we offered to help him. But when we managed to pull it out... We didn't expect to see that..."

Sakura's face pales at the memory of the corpse.

"Miss, when you were referring to Seika-san, you almost called him by his given name? Is there a reason for that?" Yoru's father asked.

"Y-Yes, you see he's a regular patron at our establishment for many years. And over the course of time, I eventually got along with him. He even asked that I call each other by given names since he felt that calling me by my surnames was too formal."

Hm... So Renge Seika was close to Sakura Hanafude. Yoru made sure to take note of that. This could be useful for their investigation.

" Yoru," Yoru's father said to his son. In his hand he was holding a tuna sandwich with vegetables inside of it. This was his father's way of telling him it was time to eat even though they just ate not very long ago.

Yoru knew those young child detectives were going to look through the entire garden to find out how the reporter was killed and something like jewelry, a wallet, or a tear of who the person was but they probably didn't know what Yoru knew about Ayame and Sakura.

" You need more meat, Yoru." Yoru hated being reminded that. It wasn't he had to spend a lot of time thinking about cases. " The sandwiches here are about the only thing you can eat with both your hands."

After questioning Renge Seika, they learned that he was a regular patron of the botanical and that he had a close relationship with not just Sakura but the other two suspects as well.

"Sakura? Oh, I've been good friends with her for a long time. She and Ayame were always together practically inseparable. Make me kind of jealous." Renge lightly joked with a hint of melancholy in his words.

"So you knew not just Ms. Hanafuda, but Ms. Sakurai as well. Just those two?" Yoru's father questioned.

"Not just them, Sayuri too. The four of us were really close and great friends."

"Were?" Yoru noticed Renge used past tense meaning they used to be close friends.

"Yeah, not long ago the four of us were really close, but then Ayame's husband past away a few months ago when the botanical garden started booming. She was really devastated by his death. It was too hard trying to talk to her like that. The only one who could bring her up on her feet was Sakura. After that Ayame started sticking to Sakura like glue, almost like inseparable sisters. Soon after that Sayuri distanced herself from us. Can't blame her though. Even I have a hard time interacting with them now."

So it wasn't just those two but all the of the suspects knew each other. This was getting interesting. Was it coincidence... Or not? Whatever it was Yoru was going to find out.

"According to Ms. Hanafuda, you were at the lake fishing and while there you thought your hook was caught between some rocks but in actuality was the late victim. You assumed that the victim had drowned so you went to get a doctor while Ms. Hanafuda and Ms. Sakurai performed first aid." Yoru's father explained. "Usually, that sort of case, even if the deceased was still alive, most people would think that he was dead based on your circumstances. What made you assume that he had drowned?"

"It's a hobby of mine to fish under a big tree especially with flowers or one near flowers at least. It helps me relax and get some inspiration. And the reason, I assumed he had drowned was because I thought he was trying to lower the place's reputation by drowning on purpose. He's nothing but a scumbag. Wouldn't put it past him to do something as rotten as that. If he hadn't died, I would have killed him myself." Renge's eyes showed pure hatred in them not waning in the least.

"K-Kill?" Yoru's father repeated. He knew the reporter did write horrible criticism towards him but say that he would kill in this type of situation.

"Ah, but make no mistake. I didn't kill him. Though I wish I did." Renge lowered his gaze. "But if I did something like that, she'd be sad..."

Thinking back at the questioning, Yoru remembered one crucial part that Renge said to them.

"On my way to the lake, I happened to pass by Sayuri, but she was in too much of a rush to notice me. Don't know what got into her. She looked really pale and scared almost like she was about to throw up."

Yoru's father probably suspected Sayuri, but it was too early for Yoru to determine.

Although it was still too early to identify the culprit, Yoru did know who he was going to speak with next. Next up for interview... Sayuri Kaben.

"Ms. Sayuri Kaben, from what I've learned, you're the caretaker of the lake where the deceased was found at?" Yoru's father asked.

"That's right." Sayuri responded indifferently.

Yoru found it odd. For someone who was a nervous wreck in Renge's story, she was strangely calm in front of Yoru's father, a detective. And her manner was much different from before when Yoru saw her in the lobby.

"Then I take it that you were at the lake doing your usual maintenance?"

"Sadly, I was not. Although I am in charge of managing the lake, I have other duties and oversee other parts of the botanical as well. Today was quite busy. I was so caught up with my other duties that I wasn't able to arrive at the lake until I heard about the incident."

"So you never went to the lake before then? Not once?" Yoru's father asked forwardly.

"No."

"Then did you, by any chance, run into anyone today?"

"No, not that I can recall. I was quite in a hurry so I don't think I would have if I had."

'Hmm...' Yoru smelled something amiss about this whole situation. Sayuri was hiding something, but the question was what was it? If she was the culprit, then she wouldn't have reacted the way she did when Renge saw her. The reporter's death was planned and calculated yet her reaction would have belonged to someone who had unintentionally killed someone.


	4. Chapter 4

**Sorry I took so long to send this chapter but I was busy and it was a lot of writing. From this chapter onwards all of the story written by me and Kaede Tsukino was pasted from where we wrote it and published on the same day. **

XXX

Ai was yielding to find more evidence that showed who committed the crime. She wasn't as lucky as Conan or even the dumb kids who tried to solve murders. What Ai was doing wasn't looking for blood, broken vases or people admitting they did it. She was going to the little girls room otherwise called the bathroom.

'_That should do...'_ Finishing up her business, Ai was about to exit the stall when she heard voices from the other side.

"Really... For a murder to occur here, this place must be curse." A female staff member said.

"I agree. Business was bad as it was when that reporter put up that nasty review. Now this place is officially doomed. No one's going to want to come here anymore."

"Maybe I should quit before it goes out of business."

"Me too. If anything, I bet it was the young mistress who did. Must have been tired looking after the place."

"No, it has to be Kaben-san. Don't you remember the rumors about her family's business failing because of that reporter. She probably did to get revenge. Just like her name, she lives for revenge."

"Whoever did it. I just hope they catch the perpetrator. I don't want to walk around knowing there's a murder among us."

Nothing too new, Ai already knew most of it when she went looking around for information with Conan and the others, but what caught her interest was the next part.

"With a detective here, it shouldn't take too long to find the culprit."

"I wouldn't bet on it. I heard he brings his kid around everywhere with him even when he questions the staff. He even brought his kid to the murder scene!"

"What! What kind of father brings his own child to a murder scene!"

"I know, right?"

A detective carrying a kid with him. Sounds a lot like that shoddy detective Sleeping Kogoro although in his case the real one solving the cases is Conan Edogawa. The fact that Yoru's father was bringing his own child to a murder scene was very suspicious. No parent would actually do such a thing even regular adults wouldn't do that. Ai grew suspicious... very suspicious.

Ai was looking at two options of what she could do. The first thing on her mind was either going to Conan to tell him about the suspicious thing she saw or not tell him but still keep an eye on the father to see if he really was using his son to solve the mysteries for him. The second idea that came to her mind was not caring if a father had a genius son who solved mysteries for him and just solved the mystery she had right now.

Moving onto the next interviewee, Yoru and his father question Ayame Sakurai.

"Honestly, Sakura and I were so terrified when we saw the corpse. I wasn't sure if he was even alive at the time until Sakura checked his pulse. He was so cold and lifeless."

Based on what Ayame said, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary about it. It matched up with Sakura's story.

"I understand. That must have been a frightening experience for you." Yoru's father felt sympathetic for Ayame. Although he's never really fished up a corpse, he knew that it was not a pretty sight. He'd probably scream out in terror if he saw one.

"Ne, what kind of flower arrangements did you do?" Yoru asked.

"You're curious?"

"Yeah, I want to see what they look like! Can we see them!"

"If you'd like, I'll show you them, but they haven't been put in the shop just yet with all that's happened so far. I believe I left them in the green house."

"Take us there! I want to see them! I want to see!" Yoru childishly whined.

"Yoru, stop this! What are doing! This is no way to behave!" Yoru's father scolded his son for his out of character actions.

"Hehe... It's okay. I don't mind." Ayame assured Yoru's father. "It makes me delighted to see a child so interested in my works."

After finally coming into an agreement, Yoru's father concedes to his son's selfish request. Ayame guides Yoru and his father to the green house as promised.

"Since when were you interested in flowers?" Yoru's father whispered to Yoru.

"Never. There's something I want to look at first. You keep her busy while I'm gone." Yoru says before leaving his father with Ayame.

"Hey, wait!" Yoru's father accidentally yelled out to his son forgetting about Ayame's presence.

"Excuse me? Am I walking too much? It's only a few feet ahead." Ayame wasn't sure if she did anything to offend Yoru's father.

"N-No, nothing like that." Yoru's father denied. "I-I was just..."

While his father keeps Ayame busy, Yoru scans the area for something until he comes across the storage shed. Fortunately, it was unlocked. Without further adieu, Yoru opens up the storage shed and finds the trolley Ayame used to haul the equipment and flowers. On the trolley, he found a green tarp over a rectangular box. Based on the size, it didn't look like it'd be that difficult to a corpse under it. Checking to make sure, Yoru lifts up the tarp a little to see a rectangular cedar under it. Oddly, enough the cedar was upside down. Yoru lifts up the cedar a little to check for something.

'_No bloodstains..._'

Back when the corpse was found, the back of the head was clearly bleeding. So if this was used, there should be bloodstains here unless they were already cleaned up, but that wouldn't matter in a lithium test.

What did matter was who was the one cleaning the blood. No one could look at blood on the floor without wondering who's blood was spilled. The only thing that looks identical to blood on the floor is cranberry juice spilled on a white carpet. What people didn't know was that when you clean blood you leave your fingerprints on the sponge used to clean off the blood.

Yoru was thinking about the lithium test and how he could help.

After asking his father to check the trolley for any traces of blood, the lithium test came out clean which was strange. The back of the victim's head was bleeding profoundly when they found the body. If the trolley had been used to carry the victim, there should have been a reaction. Even if it was covered, there should been something in that shed that should have had some reaction to the test.

Speaking of which, why did the victim tightly clench onto those flower petals? Was it merely to locate the real scene of the crime? If so, after further investigation, it should have been easy to find the scene based on the body shape imprint left on the flowers. For what reason was it so important to hold onto those flowers? He's pretty much got everything down except for that one key point.

Meanwhile as Yoru was contemplating on the matter, at the same time, Conan and the others were going over the results of their investigation.

"Conan, have you found out who it is?" Ayumi asked her bespectacled friend/ crush.

"Almost, just need to figure out one more thing to tie things up."

"I bet it was that flower arranger guy! He was being bashed on by that reporter so he probably wanted to kill him! He even said so himself that he wanted kill him!" Mitsuhiko voiced his opinion.

"No, it's got to be that Hana woman! She owns the place so she should know all the secret locations like the back of her hand and easily find a way to hide the body. Plus that reporter guy even almost put her family's botanical garden out of business once."

"No way. If she did that, she would have known that it'd be bad for the business if someone was killed here."

"What do you think Haibara?" Genta asked Ai.

"In my opinion, the most suspicious would be Sayuri Kaben. Her behavior is the most odd among them. And probably like her name, she lives for revenge..."

Wait! Name! Both Yoru and Conan finally found the last piece of the puzzle they needed.

'_So that's what it was...'_ Now everything flew into place.

_'It was so obvious that it was a dead give away.'_ Like Yoru, Conan understood what was going on.

Although he found the answer to the case, Yoru decided to leave this to Conan. This was a perfect chance to confirm his suspicions on Conan.

"So pretty." Ayumi commented one of the lovely flower arrangements in Sakura Hanafuda's room.

"She has a lot of flowers in her room." Ai added.

On top of her drawer, Conan found a framed picture of Sakura Hanafuda, Ayame Sakurai, Renge Seika, and Sayuri Kaben when they were kids. It was just as Renge Seika said. They had known each other since childhood.

Meanwhile, Yoru was digging through the bookshelf where he found an old photo album containing various of pictures most of which were from Sakura Hanafuda's childhood when she played with Ayame Sakurai, Renge Seika, and Sayuri Kaben.

"Look at this." Mitsuhiko noticed that Yoru was looking over Sakura Hanafuda's old photo albums. "There are a bunch of pictures of them in here."

"Wow, there's a lot of them when they were kids." Genta joined in.

"This must be an old childhood album." Ai inferred.

Next up was Ayame Sakurai's room. Just like Sakura Hanafuda's room, they found numerous amounts of flowers there except most of them being irises. However there was one thing off, Conan noticed was that one vase had less flowers than the others.

Atop a drawer was a small ring box. It looked kind of big for one ring. So Yoru opened it as his detective instincts were telling him to. Inside, he found a pair of wedding rings. One was in perfect condition not a single scratch on it while the other was rusted and scratched up. Yoru remembered hearing about Ayame's late husband who passed away. That ring must have belonged to him.

The question was how did it get like this. While Ayame's ring was in mint condition, the husband's ring was far from it. A large contrast between the two.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Detective Boys found an old photo album. Like Sakura's, Ayame's had several pictures from when she was a child and played at Sakura's home. Not just that, but there were also pictures of when her family's business was still running before it went under as well as pictures of her wedding.

"Wow, she's so pretty~" Ayumi found Ayame's wedding dress really pretty and blushed at the thought of holding a wedding ceremony with Conan. "How nice..."

"Let me see." Conan popped in between Ayumi and Ai. What was this?! Interesting. A grin forms on Conan's face. This photo album was a very big help. Now he solved one part of the mystery that he couldn't solve before. _'So that's what it was...'_

Conan or Yoru had to take the photo album with them. Did Yoru put up a fight with Conan or who would take the photo album as evidence? It looked like Yoru was looking for some other piece of evidence, outside. Ai spied him leaving the room before anyone else.

' _What is he looking for_?' she thought.

Ai said nothing to the other detectives when she walked out the door to follow Yoru. It stayed that way even when she wasn't in the room. Ayumi was still lost in her mind about what she would look like older and wearing that dress, Ai didn't see any sign of Sakura in the hall, and Conan was fixated on what was in the photo album.

After checking Ayame Sakurai's room was Renge Seika's room. No surprise they found tons of flower arrangements made by him. Seeing all the beautiful arrangements, he really was the heir to a famous flower arranging school. The irises were especially beautiful.

The first thing Conan inspects is Renge's childhood photo album. Like the others, he found many pictures from his childhood. He did notice one thing. A lot of the pictures contained Ayame in them. While they also included Sakura Hanafuda and Sayuri Kaben, nearly each picture had Ayame in them. Conan found this very interesting.

Then they checked Sayuri Kaben's room. Passing through the flowery scenery, Conan checks Sayuri's photo album where he found old pictures from her childhood. Some of them included mainly pictures of her and Ayame. Conan took note of this.

After looking through the suspects' rooms, Conan was able to finally tie up the loose ends of this mystery. All that was left was to reveal who the true culprit was.


	5. Chapter 5

**I am always happy when a series has a lot of chapters/episodes on its plate but every episode feels the same in mysteries. Although Detective Conan isn't much different when its popular people will read it. **

XXX

Yoku was ready to place the mystery together. Clearly Conan was ahead of him in a few ways but did he know the murderer didn't want the botanical garden to be ruined? Did he know the right ways the murderer got rid of the corpse?

Yoku wasn't just thinking about this stuff to himself. He was sitting on a chair next to Ai. She was bossy to learn the information Yoku had to explain in words and elaborate everything used to kill the reporter.

" If I didn't have to learn this I would close my eyes to save brain power," she told Yoku coldly.

Gathering up all the suspects in one room with Professor Agasa, the Detective Boys, Yoru's father, and Yoru, Conan begins his deduction by speaking through his voice changing bow tie. Using Professor Agasa as a front, Conan explains the series of events that have occurred.

"As you all know, the diseased victim's death was camouflaged to appear as an accident and that the identity of the culprit behind the victim's death is left unknown. However there are several inconsistencies in this mystery. For instance, why did the victim's corpse appear in the lake while the crime scene was actually in the iris japonica field? Why did the culprit take the unnecessary effort to transport the body and how? But the biggest question is why did the caretaker who was supposedly not at the lake lied in her alibi?"

Sayuri Kaben flinches at the last part when Conan (through Professor Agasa) mentions her alibi. Unease appears on her face. She couldn't tell them. No, she couldn't.

"Wait, you're not thinking Sayuri is the culprit!" Sakura spoke out.

"I know I said that she was acting strange, but that doesn't mean she did it!" Renge joined in defend his childhood friend.

In all the years, those two have known her. They knew that their friend would never do something as to commit a heinous crime like murder.

"I believe it's time to stop going at this roundabout. It's about time you stop making your friends worry and admit to your crime..."

A cold chill goes down Sakura and Renge's spine. He was kidding, right? There's no way their precious friend could possibly be a murderer. Having enough, Sakura and Renge weren't going to stand by and do nothing while their friend was basely being accused of murder.

"Enough! Will you quit it!"

"There's no way Sayuri could do it!"

"Ayame Sakurai!" Conan announced.

Ayame!

Both Sakura and Renge were shocked to hear her name. It wasn't Sayuri but Ayame. No way, they couldn't accept this.

Sayuri glumly looks down at the floor unable to retaliate or say anything.

"M-Me?" Ayame said.

"That's right. First, you killed the victim at the field of iris japonicas knowing that he was a reporter and likely to write an article about the inn's most famous flower that has recently bloomed. Then you carried off the victim's body to the lake where you set up the corpse adrift on a boat. You fixed the boat so that it would sink after a certain amount of time so that you could make it look like an accident. This way you could falsify the actual time of death and have enough time to set up an alibi proving your innocence while people thought he drowned in the lake."

"Excuse me, but I think you're mistaken. There's no way I could have possibly killed anyone." Ayame defended. "I was with Sakura the whole time so there was no way I could have had enough time to do all that."

"That would be true if the victim was killed after you made contact Hanafuda-san. But if the victim was killed before, then that's a different story."

"That's ridiculous! I was with Ayame the whole time, and I never once saw a corpse or anything remotely like that!" Sakura spoke out.

"Then what if the corpse was with you the entire time but you just didn't realize it?"

" What are you talking about?" Sakura spoke out.

Conan didn't tell Sakura what he was talking about at first. He whistled for his detective friends to come in and they came in with the evidence.

Genta, Ayumi, and Mitsuhiko rolled in a trolley with bunch of pots over a large rectangular box covered with a green tarp.

Ayame slightly pales at the young kids pulling in the trolley.

"What's this?" Sakura asked.

"According to your testimony, you and Sakurai-san were out performing your duties. You assisted Sakurai-san who appeared to be in need of help and offered your assistance. From a third party's perspective, that would be a solid alibi however that's if the both of you were with each the entire time. Were you?"

Sakura Hanafuda breaks out in a cold sweat. "No, we weren't. But it was only a few times did we separate for a while but it wasn't that long. Five minutes at most! And you said that the corpse was with us the whole time too! But I swear I didn't see any resembling a corpse. Just a bunch of pots and gardening equipment!"

"No, there is a way to conceal her sinful act without letting you be aware of it. Look right here." Conan has Professor Agasa gesture over to the trolley the three Detective Boys brought in. "I assume this is a similar replication of the trolley Sakurai-san had with her when you first met."

Sakura Hanafuda reluctantly nods her head in agreement.

*Knock* *Knock*

Sakura Hanafuda as well as Renge Seika and Sayuri Kaben were startled by the knocking sound coming from the trolley. Just what was that?!

On cue, Ayumi removes the green tarp revealing a wooden cedar box used for gardening placed upside down on the trolley. Then Genta and Mitsuhiko lift up the cedar box revealing Yoru's father underneath who was the source of the knocking.

"As you can guess, the cedar box is quite large and has enough space to contain a fully grown man. Thus concealing any visibility of a corpse in sight. And the method Sakurai-san used to hide the diseased from you."

"This is riduculous! Ayame would never do such a thing!" Renge stated.

"No, she did. And she has a witness to her crime."

!

A witness he said. This caught their attention.

"Isn't that right, Kaben-san?"

All eyes are directed at Sayuri Kaben who was nervously shaking when she heard her name from Professor Agasa's (Conan) mouth.

"I think I would know if there was a dead body near me " Sakura yelled in outrage.

"I thought you might say that "Canon replied using Agasa's front. "You wouldn't be able to see it if it were hidden by the gardening tools. You see I have reason to suspect that the body was hidden under tarp inside the cedar chest. You see the cedar box is rather large and could easily fit the average man inside." Conan replied please with himself

"I called Bluff " Renge called interrupting The side interrogation "there is no way that she could've done that oregano's I was man's body could deathly never get in there there is no wayregular size man would fit."

"I thought you might say this so I have a range some visual evidence so Mr. Yuro. Please step out with me for a moment.

"Why might I ask? "Mr. Yuro ask from his seat next to his son with a bit of alarm on his face.

"Since you are roughly the size of the victim you can aid me in a little visual exhibit. "

"OK "

Mr. Yuro Sheakley got up from his seat and followed the professor out of the door it was no more than 30 minutes before the professor walked in explaining that exhibit A would be in in one minute. Soon faint knocking  
Could be heard from the other side of the door they were faster promptly open the door

Bringing in yet another trolley with a cedar box except this time Yoru's father was the one pushing it, Yoru's father pushed the trolley and lifted up the cedar box to reveal Renge Seika underneath on his side with his knees pushed close to his body.

"I believe I've ridden you of your doubt, Seika-san." Conan said through the voice changing bow tie with Professor Agasa as his front man.

Having proven wrong, Renge couldn't refute.

"Even if the corpse could have possibly fit, that doesn't prove that it was actually there!"

"No, it was there. And that is the undeniable truth!" Conan rebutted. "And there are only two people who can prove this: the murderer, herself, and the witness."

Conan continues on with his deduction.

"Although it wouldn't take long for the culprit falsify the victim's death as an accident, it never occurred to her that a bystander could have coincidentally pass by or the caretaker at least. Since the two of you were coworkers, it wouldn't be too hard for the other to find out the other's working hours or when they'll show up." Professor Agasa turns his gaze over to Ayame as Conan speaks. "However, unfortunately for you, Kaben-san happened across your preparations while you weren't looking."

"You're wrong!" Sayuri shouted out. "Ayame didn't do it! It was me! It didn't see Ayame do anything. I was my first murder so I was shakened up by it. Even if he was scum, anyone would be horrified to kill someone!"

"Sayuri..." Sakura softly spoke out her friend's name. Renge too shared the same emotions as Sakura.

"I was the killer! I should be the one taken to jail, not Ayame! It was me!"

"Enough..." Ayame interjected stopping Sayuri's confession. "You don't need to take the blame for me."

"Wait, it couldn't be..." Sakura couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Ayame?"

And neither could Renge.

"It was me. I was the murderer." Ayame confessed much to Sakura and Renge's disbelief.

Conan knew she was the killer. Even without her confession it was sealed she would be going to prison. In his opinion her trying to not be arrested was working too hard and working not so hard on the things she should have been working on.

" Your friends have heard you confess; confess and tell them what makes you the murderer."

That was Conan telling her she had an ultimatum. It wasn't everyday Conan let the murderer's confess their own crimes, but most of the time they denied their crimes to the end.

No way, they couldn't believe this. Renge and Sakura couldn't believe that their friend was a murderer. But at the same time, they could understand why she did it.

"W-Why?" Sakura stammered unable to face reality.

"For the botanical garden..."

Sakura and Renge weren't surprised by Ayame's answer. Of course, she wouldn't never do something like murder unless it was for someone else's sake.

"I couldn't allow it. He nearly ruined this place once. And now that we were finally able to get back on our feet, he comes back again to smear our good name in the mud once more. H-He only brought nothing but despair for us and ruined our lives. All for his selfishness!"

It was very rare for them to hear their friend raise up her voice, but it was only natural in this case.

"But why did that lady say she was the murderer when she didn't do it? That doesn't make any sense." Genta questioned Sayuri's motive for taking blame of the crime.

"It's only natural to protect the people you love even if it met your own demise." Conan answered Genta's question through his voice changing bow tie. "Especially for her own sister."

Sister! This surprised Genta, Ayumi, Ai, and Mitsuhiko. So Ayame and Sayuri were sisters. That meant that Sayuri took the weight of the crime, because she wanted to protect her sister from going to jail.

"No! Ayame would never kill anyone! It was me!" Sayuri insisted that she was the criminal despite everyone knowing that it was Ayame.

"It's enough, Sayuri-ne." Ayame stopped her sister. "I honestly didn't care if I was charged with murder, but I didn't want our beautiful botanical garden to be renowned as a murder site after all our hard work so I made it look like an accident. I didn't mean to show you such a horrible scene. I was not a good little sister, was I?"

"N-no, I'm a horrible older sister for making my little sister go through such a thing." Sayuri cried.

This was the only time Conan saw the two sisters hug with tears dripping down their faces. What starts off as confessing and crying would one day turn into separation. With one sister in prison and the other one letting that sister let her sister in prison control her life would ruin them both.

It was nevertheless a case closed, a achievement for Professor Agasha when Conan gave him all the evidence used to find out it was her even though he explained it to the sisters himself, and he could finally walk out of the botanical gardens. It was a well deserved leave when he should have left the garden hours ago.

Conan walked out followed by no one. He didn't know why the kids didn't leave the botanical garden yet but as it turned out there was a kid as young as him greeting him when he left. Conan even recognized him as a kid in his class.

" That was impressive how you solved the case," Yoru said. He sounded impressed, but at the same time he wanted to say how he could've solved the case faster and better than Conan. " In the end did you find the result you were hoping for, putting away a girl who just wanted to protect the place she works in?"

"No, it wasn't just that." Conan responded. "What most likely drove her to commit murder wasn't the fear of losing this place but the death of her husband. I remembered reading an article about a car accident some time ago. The victim of the article being her late husband. Despite being the victim, he received a lot of criticism and blame for the accident. The other party lived and was none other than the diseased who was the writer of the article. And when she saw the diseased, she felt nothing but contempt for the man and believed that he would eventually bring ruin to their beloved botanical garden so she did away with him. At first, I wasn't certain for sure, but when I saw the rings in her room, I was convinced that she was the widow of the victim."

"..." Yoru had nothing to add for what Conan said was true. In hindsight, Yoru felt pity for the poor woman who suffered so much because of that man, but even so that was no reason to commit murder. For murder was a sin that one could not wash away from their conscience for all of eternity.

"Now onto more important matters, who are you?" Conan asked. "You are no ordinary kid. You may act like a normal, curious child using your father as a front, but you periodically show signs of intelligence beyond your age. Even like just now, you obviously knew the answer to the case yet you let me handle it in order to test me. What exactly is your aim?"

"... It's not like you are any different. Using that professor as a front to draw suspicion away from yourself, you are no different from me."

"You..."

"From that little test of mine, you have proven my suspicions correct."

A bit of sweat drips from Conan's cheek. This guy...

"I'm just like you. We are two people on the same boat."

Conan was going to believe what Yoru was telling him. He was a smart young man trapped in an even younger but still extremely smart young man.


	6. Chapter 6

**If I remember correctly this is the chapter I liked the most because it took a lot of thinking to write. **

XXX

A sixteen year old girl named Natalie Brooks was going out with her friends the day before she had five tests to do-her parents didn't know and she lied to them telling them she was going to the library to study with her friends.

Natalie knew there was nothing wrong with her even when people asked " who" do you think you are. She was just a girl not made of glass. She tried, she worked hard, but sometimes she wanted to have the dangerous fun that could get her grounded forever.

Car, stolen. Drivers license, fake. Makeup and clothes, all purple. She was ready to have a fun time tonight. She wasn't planning on taking any money with her because she believed her friends were going to pay for anything she wanted.

The next morning, Conan couldn't help but be off in a disarray as he stared off into the sky.

"_I'm just like you. We are two people of the same boat."_

Those were the last words Conan had heard from Yoru before the latter left with his father. And just like them, he and the rest of his friends had finished up their business at the botanical garden.

'_Yoru Kurihara...'_

Conan remembered him as the new kid in his class. However not once had he interacted with the kid... until now. The air around him did seem a bit different from the rest, but he just assumed the guy was antisocial seeing as how he hardly spoke with anyone in their class.

'The same boat, huh..." Conan thought as he drove deeper into his thoughts until...

"Yoko! Yoko!" Kogoro Mouri, Ran's father and a lousy detective, started chanting out Yoko's name as he watched a shampoo commercial starring the idol.

Conan both laughed and sighed seeing the old man watching that shampoo commercial; there was a time this behaviour would be expected, but he was watching it on the hours he should be working.

For an even bigger laugh Conan imagined what Ran's father did the last time he saw this shampoo commercial. He talked to that idol like she was in front of him, and he was boosting about his great detective skills and how he solved cases...before he was hit by Conan's tranquilizer gun of course.

"Conan-kun, it's almost time for the limited time sale at the supermarket. We better go right now if we want some delicious stew for dinner tonight." Ran informs the child detective as she gets her bag.

"Yes." Conan responded.

Anything beat hanging out with this idol obsessed detective.

XXXXXXXX

On their way to the supermarket for dinner, Conan and Ran were having some small talk between themselves about various of things like what to make for dinner or how embarrassing Ran's father can be.

"Look at that!" Ran notices a poster up on a bakery about some new menu items. "I remember the cakes here are really amazing. The cream puffs too were very rich in taste."

At that moment, Ran's stomach starts growling in hunger. Ran immediately blushes having let out such an embarrassing sound.

"Make one cream puff wouldn't hurt..."

"Ran ne-chan, you just went to a cake buffet last week with your friends. You're going to get fat if you eat anymore." Conan pointed out.

"..." Ran slightly pauses at Conan's words. Thinking about it something like that did happen. "Just one wouldn't hurt."

Neither way, Ran still brought some slices of cake and a few cream puffs from the bakery. While eating a cream puff in her hands and the box of cakes and cream puffs in the other, Ran and Conan who was also munching on a cream puff Ran gave him were heading back to the supermarket until they heard some interesting news from the televisions in the window display about a recent case that occurred.

" Today we have sad news of a young boy named Todd Fianschel. Todd was a promising young student with an I.Q. that rivaled many geniuses throughout the country. Young Todd was brilliant in his knowledge of science and having a brain that could do things no other geniuses ever imagined the brain could think. Unfortunately, Todd was murdered when he was in an internship to the most prestige job in the world of technology and science."

While Conan and Ran's eyes were caught on the television display, someone's shoulder had bumped into Ran, but the person didn't stop and just continued to run past them at great speed.

"What was that?" Ran wondered why that person was in such a hurry. Did they need to use the restroom or something? Speaking of which... "Oh no, we need to hurry or the sale is going to end!"

Ran checked her phone to see the time. She had been so preoccupied with the bakery and the news that she had forgotten that they were in a hurry as well.

Ran dashes to the market with Conan in hopes of getting tonight's dinner.

XXXXXXXXX

Returning back home from the market, Ran was able to make it to the sale and get all the ingredients she needed. Moreover, she got some raffle tickets in the market along with her purchases. The prizes were quite appealing too. Grand prize was a 3 day 2 night trip to an onsen plus a giant panda plushie as a bonus. First prize was a laptop. Second prize was a Sherlock Holmes book. Third prize was a gift card.

"Oh, look Conan. They're having a raffle. Luckily, we have a lot of tickets from the market. Is there anything you want? That panda plushie is cute. I'm hoping to get that."

"The second prize." Conan answered.

"I should have guessed. You're a big Sherlock Holmes fan as much as Shinichi." Ran felt silly for asking. "Alright, I'll get that for you!"

'_No way...'_ Conan internally said to himself. It was hard as it was to get one prize let alone two and one of them was the grand prize no less.

"Winner!" The man at the stand rung his bell signalling a prize winner as a small golden ball laid on the tray.

'_No way!'_ Seriously, she actually got the grand prize.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

"No way! Grand prize!" Kogoro Mouri exclaimed in surprise as soon as his daughter showed him the prize she won.

Conan could empathize with Kogoro's feelings as held onto the Sherlock Holmes book Ran gave him.

he was right about how he liked Sherlock Holmes and how Shinichi liked Sherlock Holmes just as much as he did-he couldn't tell her he and Shinichi were the exact same. He didn't know what to make of Ran having the grand prize though.

Conan only wanted to focus on his Sherlock Holmes book. The second prize was a very good Sherlock Holmes book that kept him both interested and excited about what might happen. It even had some lines that were becoming his new favorite to talk about.

It was a mystery how things always worked out for her, but hey now they have a trip to the onsen.

" I guess we better get packing!" Mouri exclaimed.

After taking off her jacket so that she begin packing her luggage, Ran noticed a strange flash drive in her pocket.

'Strange, I don't recall buying this.' Ran wasn't sure how this flash drive got into her pocket. It was probably her's and she just left it there. "Oh no, I've got to start dinner!"

Ran had almost forgotten to make dinner.

Tonight, they were having beef stew.

XXXXXXXXXXX

Driving up the road through the car Kogoro rented, the three of them couldn't contain their excitement. At least, one of them anyway.

"Girls..." Kogoro drooled over as he drove. "Nude girls... Onsen... Mixed bathing..."

"Dad, this is why mom left." Ran deadpanned over her embarrassing womanizing father. "Can't you act normal for once. And we don't even know if it has mixed baths."

"Who cares at least I'll be away from that nagging, old bat for three whole days!"

However Kogoro spoke too soon. Because when they first arrived at the entrance of the onsen, the first person they meet is none other than the so called 'nagging, old bat' Eri Kisaki wearing an onsen yukata.

Seeing his wife here could only mean one thing.

"Don't tell me..."

Kogoro send a suspicious glance over to Ran who was just as surprised to see her mother there.

"What a coincidence, Mom! You're here too! This must be fate telling you two something." Ran slightly nudges her father forward. "What are you doing here?"

"I don't know about fate, but I'm here for work unlike a certain carefree detective." Eri eyes her husband. "Apparently, the owner here has been facing a lot of harassment from a company trying to buy the land. So I was hired to settle the dispute."

" Are you going to be inside or outside?" Kogoro asked with tears running down his face.

" I'm going to keep an eye on you." Eri said still eyeing her husband.

It was going to drive Kogoro nuts if he had to be watched from his wife for the entire trip. He was a very sad grown man and this time it wasn't from being a clueless detective. His wife would not leave him alone just yet. It was decided while he was spacing out that they would go to a restaurant.

" But I already ate!" Kogoro complained.

" You shouldn't have. Knowing you it was probably deep friend food with lots of melted cheese on it and rice balls, not to mention alcohol. Me, you, and Ran will have the coolest and most refreshing drinks while you can drink nothing. We will also be having a platter of something I find very delicious."

Kogoro didn't trust his wife to like something he would want to eat. All he could think about when he was back with his wife was finding a way to escape from her.

Knowing his wife, he smartly chose to stay silent before something went wrong and he would end up in the hospital with a broken leg or something. He went over the ways to leave her without an accident. Hm, he could...call the client and make them end up talking for days? That would give him time to escape. No, she had a sharp eye. How about...

"Oh, Ran! You're here! Maybe you could take your father somewhere else while I discuss some matters with my client?" Kisaki Eri fondly explained to her. Kogoro lit up on the inside. He couldn't believe that this was actually happening! Such good luck! Maybe the same luck would come when he had a horse race... Just like Ran got the grand prize.

"But..." Ran sighed.

As her mother told, Ran took her father and Conan to their room after getting the keys. This wasn't much of a vacation at this point. She didn't think she'd run into her mother here of all places. This was the perfect opportunity to get them back together and start living as a family of three or four with Conan.

If only, both of her parents weren't so stubborn and something could be done to change her mother's opinion of dad. Though...

"Onsen. Mixed bathing." Her father began sprouting out like an idiot which he was.

That was a long run.

"The hostess was a babe. But that lady at the front desk wasn't so bad either."

How embarrassing. And this was her father no less. Ran sweat drops at the sight of her embarrassing father. Hopefully, she'll at least get the both of them to get lunch and dinner together.

Even Conan couldn't help but sweat drop too. He knew how much she wanted to get her parents together again. The only problem was the husband in question. He can't exactly blame Eri for leaving either. Most women would have already cut off all ties and divorced by now.

XXXXXXXXXX

Meanwhile inside another room, a group of IT workers were enjoying their time at the onsen especially one. Daichi Takano, an IT researcher, was drunk off of the sake.

"Geez, there he goes and gets drunk on his own." A female intern, Ruri Blythe, chided.

"Leave him be..." A male coworker, Nicholas Fay, defended his friend. "Especially after happened..."

The mood immediately turns dark at his words.

None of them wanted to remember it. That horrid memory and him.

Ran wanted to say something that could change her mothers mind. Before any of the sides could react, Kogoro was found by a group of investors and taken for a drink. It was amazing how fast the investors got her father to go for a drink.

That left Ran and her mother. She opened her mouth to say something persuading, but she was swept away by her clients.

It looked like Ran would be spending her vacation alone, but there was someone who wanted to spend time with her. He was small but he wasn't Conan. He was the boy who believed he was a better detective than Conan and he was the same age as him. It was Yoru the boy who solved mysteries.

Yoru knew deep inside he was no match for Conan, but he didn't want to seem weak. He also remembered Ran that day she went to Elementary school to pick Conan up. That made jealousy sprout in every vein. However, being jealous all the time was unprofessional of Yoru.

That made him try harder to get Ran's attention to him, because Yoru knew Conan was off on a case that he had 'stumbled' on. He had heard that he wouldn't be back for a few days.

" Is it your head or heart that feels scarred?" Yoru asked.

"Um...heart," She replied, looking into the distance shamefully.

" It's impossible to heal a scarred brain but do you know how you heal a scarred heart?" Yoru looked at the ocean with his finger pointed at the water. " Good work winning the vacation. Why don't you go for a swim."

"Uh, but, I didn't really bring a swimming suit..."

" I'm pretty sure they sell swimsuits in a shop around here."

"Okay, I'm sure it won't harm anybody..."

Yoru pointed to the clothes shop where he wanted Ran to buy her bathing suit.

Ran smiled. "Arigato, Yoru, for being here when nobody else is."

Yoru just shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, I'll get that bathing suit," Ran spoke.

Yoru decided to play in the sand while Ran went to buy a swimsuit. It wasn't long before Ran came running back with a pink bag containing her newly bought suit.

Yoru wondered why she would need to carry the bathing suit in a pink bag. Ran, catching the direction of his eyes, explained,

"I don't want anybody to know I'm also carrying souvenirs for a special friend of mine in here." Her eyes seemed to go unfocused after 'a special friend of mine'.

" Tell that special friend to thank you even more for going through all your trouble just for him."

She gently laughed. "That wasn't any trouble. Besides, I would go through a tornado to help him."

Yoru hadn't been this confused since he decided to create his own beliefs and made one up that was completely ridiculous.

"You mean...he's your boyfriend? No, he saved you from a fire. Ah, I got it! He's your father!" Yoru pointed a finger at the sky.

Ran just laughed and walked away.

"Huh? I was sure I got that right," Yoru muttered

To him he was right and Ran was just being strange. Yoru shrugged and said that he would meet Ran at the beach. He couldn't think of anything better to do than spend time with a teenage girl.

"See you," Ran called after him.

Ran was all alone again. She looked longingly at the island far out in the bay waters, where Conan worked on the case. The case she knew he could finish without worrying her. It was funny how sometimes Conan seemed to be the smartest, even out of the adults. Shinichi was the same, too.

She wondered sometimes why they were so much the same. They had same face, same smile, same favorites, and the thirst for mysteries. They could be long lost brothers or half-brothers. Possibly...even the same person.

But other kids told Ran they saw Yoru and Conan talking to one another, even another time they saw them arguing. That demolished her thoughts of them, and decided it was time that Conan get to know Yoru better.

XXXXXXXXXX

Onsen...Onsen...Ran's mind seemed only capable of repeating those few rods. Mixed baths...Onsen...  
MIXED BATHS.

That was it!

All Ran had to do was usher both her parents to the same onsen, and they'd be back together! For once, Ran actually had to thank her dad's rumblings.

"Ran-neechan, you seemed to have figured something out," Conan, who was sporting a broken wrist from the case, noticed.

"Hai," She smiled and winked. Conan smiled back.


	7. Chapter 7

**I am getting close to the ending of this story. Three or two more chapters left until the end of this story. **

XXX

Knowing Ran, Conan figured it was probably some plan to get her parents together. Since this is an onsen, the most obvious choice would be the mixed baths here. Luckily, for Ran, her father had asked the beautiful hostess if there were any mixed baths which there were as well as separate ones. The outdoor baths doubles as the mixed baths location, but only at certain times. The bath times for the outdoor baths is separated by genders for each time slot. Once, the male and female bath times are done. The outdoor baths is open for mixed bathing. And that will mostly like what Ran's going for.

Conan didn't have to be a Holmes fanatic to figure that out.

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

_"Don't go!"_

_"It's no use. I'm sick of this. As long as I'm here, you'll never be safe."_

"_I don't care! Even if it means making the whole world my enemy, I'll let you go!"_

"How boring..." Kogoro commented in pure boredom at the cliche soap opera being playing. Why did he have to watch this? Normally, he would have preferred watching one of Yoko Okino's movies or tv shows, but apparently, his daughter said otherwise.

"This just shows how poor in taste you are. This must a little bit too sophisticated for an incompetent, womanizing drunkard who wouldn't know the finer things in life." Eri remarked at her husband as she too had been forced to watch the same movie.

"Unlike you, I have more modern tastes. I'm not into films for old hags."

"You mean those idol concerts where you shout at the top of your lungs like a fool..."

Despite the thermostat not being touched, the room felt 10 degrees colder.

The peanut gallery could only watch the drama between the two married couple. Ran was thinking of a way to get the two of them on the same page while Conan was doubting the two of them were gong to make up any time soon.

"H-Hey, Conan. Want to go get some juice with me? There's a vending machine in the hallway." Ran suggested to Conan who already knew where this was going.

And might he add, that there was no way things were going to go so easily as she thinks.

Either way, Conan nods his head in agreement since he'd rather go with Ran than be stuck in a room with those two. He was definitely not getting caught up in that mess.

And so, Ran took Conan out with her to get some juice leaving her parents alone in the room with a cliche romantic movie as she planned. Surely, there were going to be some sparks this time... hopefully.

XXXXXXXXXX

Yoru knew that Conan was way above his level, in academics and just basically the brains. He was pretty sure the rumor that Conan was high-school level in all his grades wasn't fake. It all mattered and yet it was all just something that disparaged the other kids from working hard.

Yoru had to admit, he had a pretty low grade on math right now. His low grades were still better than others. It was so far away though where good grades mean anything for the two elementary school boys.

To Yoru, one bad grade was nothing. Too good grades were bad. It was weird but judging grades was a personal favorite of his. After all, grades were something meant to be judged. He often heard adults say don't work too hard and don't think too much. If that was true, life was going to be really easy.

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Walking down the hallway to the baths while humming a cheerful tune in light of her high spirits, Ran couldn't wait to see the moment her parents reconcile as they romantically meet with each other under the beautiful, bright moon gazing at the stars. And finally, return back to the family of three they once were.

Her expression said it all. Though, Conan doubts things will go the way she thinks. When it comes to the two of them, the chances of Ran's scenarios happening are close to none.

"Ne, Conan. Let's get some milk after the bath." Ran suggested after spotting a long, black haired, bespectacled woman, Rose Miller, purchasing some drinks and quite a lot. Must be for a whole group.

"Sure." Conan nods in agreement.

Off to their designated bath, Conan entered the male baths while Ran went to the next door female baths. Aside from Conan, there were barely anyone else in. Just an elderly, a couple of kids with their father, and a young IT worker, Russel Duke.

Finished with their baths, Conan and Ran went back to their room. Ran hopes that her parents finally made up and decided to live together. However contrary to Ran's thoughts, she found just her drunken father a mess in their room and her mother nowhere in sight.

Seeing her so called Great Detective father in his currently sloppy appearance, it's no wonder her mother wasn't there. If anything, her father probably hadn't gone to the baths yet and just spent the whole time drinking.

After teaching her father a lesson through karate, Ran got her mother to at least join them for dinner in their room.

Kisaki was sitting down when she found her and rubbing her head as if alleviating a headache. Kisaki was never someone who let a headache ruin her work. Unless, of course, there was a drunk maniac who 'solved' cases breathing the headache into you.

"Now doesn't this feel like a proper family!" Ran commented. "Nothing better than sitting down and having a meal with the people you love. If only this could last forever, or maybe... unless a certain couple started living back together again, then that wouldn't be a problem."

'_How much more obvious do you have to be...'_ Conan internally retorted as he couldn't help but let out a forced smile.

"I think the main '**problem**' lies in the womanizing drunkard." Eri nonchalantly pointed out.

"Are you sure it doesn't have anything to do with a certain old bat's nagging?" Kogoro let on.

The atmosphere was so tense that Ran and Conan could see lightning between the two 'technically' married couple.

Conan had a feeling something like this was going to happen.

The night continued on. Blissfully unaware of the horror that awaited them the next morning.

XXXXXXX

The next morning, a bloodcurdling scream shrieked throughout the whole inn waking up everyone.

Conan would have been scared out of his mind hearing that scream if he wasn't use to it. Conan being use to that sound stemmed from him hearing about it everyday.

No detective would be taken serious wearing there pajamas. Although Conan wasn't sure if the scream was from a murder he was sure he couldn't go if Ran stopped him or if his pajamas raised any questions.

On instinct, Conan bolted out of the room and headed right to the source of the scream which was outside. Maneuvering his way through the grassy terrain and around the trees, Conan comes across the crime scene. The body of a man who appeared to be in his late twenties to early thirties. From the looks of it, it looked like he drowned. Based on his attire, he was a guest at the inn Conan along with Ran and her father were staying at.

"Hey kid, you shouldn't go near that man!" One of the onlookers exclaimed.

His detective instincts took over him as he started examining the man's body to see if he was still alive if possible.

However it was no good. The man was dead. And for a long time, he might add. Rigorous mortis had already set in.

"Kyyyaaaa!" Screamed a woman, Ruri Blythe. "Takano-san!"

The fact that she screamed out the victim's name meant that she knew the man.

"What's going on?" Russel Duke questioned wondering what the whole commotion was about. "Takano!"

So the guy knew the victim too. Conan eyed both the IT workers in suspicion.

Was this an accident or maybe...

XXXXXXX

Not long after the police showed up, several of them being familiar faces Conan knew.

"Why am I not surprised..." Inspector Megure retorted the moment he sees a certain famous sleeping detective. By his side were his two subordinates officer Takagi and officer Satou. Seeing how his former subordinate keeps running into so many crime scenes, he wouldn't surprised if the man was possessed by the grim reaper.

"What a coincidence I tell you..." Kogoro greeted Megure. "Who would have imagined that I'd come across a case in the middle of my vacation? Cases just can't seem to stop coming to be me!"

'_I can.'_ Megure internally deadpanned. _'You really are the grim reaper.'_

While Kogoro was imagining how he was lucky and Megure was imagining how he was unlucky the subordinates tried their best to help the detective and the officer solve the case.

Beginning the investigation, Megure started questioning the eye witnesses who found the body starting with a couple who like Kogoro were on vacation.

"S-Since it was a nice day, we decided to go out for a short walk." The woman first spoke. "A-And when we were following the river so that we wouldn't get lost, w-we found a drowned man. We weren't sure if he was alive or not. But before I knew it, I had screamed out of the top of my lungs."

"I see. And what time did you start your walk as well as the time you found the deceased?" Megure asked.

"I think it was around 7 that we left." The man answered for his shaken up wife. "Then about fifteen minutes later we found that man there."

"And did you notice anything unusual?"

"I don't think so. As soon as I saw the man in the river, I pulled him and gave him cpr, but it was no use. I was in too big of a rush to get him out of there to notice anything, and my wife was too frightened to notice anything."

Megure proceeded on with the questioning until he started to question Ruri Blythe and Russel Duke.

"So you two knew the deceased?" Megure repeated.

"Y-Yes, that's right." Ruri answered as she wiped her teary eyes. Russel did his best to comfort his close companion. "The three of us along with two of our coworkers checked in. We wanted to have a birthday party for a dear friend of our's. And Takano-san ended up really drunk last night. I don't know what happened after we ate since I went to take a bath and slept in my room last night."

"The same for me too. I went to take a bath after we finished dinner. But when I got back to our room, I didn't see Takano there so I thought he was taking a bath or something. Then I went to sleep too."

"You shared a room with the victim?"

"Yeah, we booked two rooms. Both separated by gender. It was me, Takano, and Nicholas in one room. Ruri and Rose in another."

Megure could see the fear in everyone's eyes but he was certain one person's fear was a lie. They all were close to the victim so maybe some of them felt responsible for the death; Megure tried to protect the people close to him but keeping the people _close_ to her safe never weighed heavily on her mind.

" So your all sure you might have heard a loud sound before finding your co-worker dead?" Megure asked.

"Th-That's right." Ruri said. "The both of us are early risers so we went out for a walk although we took our's separately so we didn't meet each other until we arrived here."

Russel nodded his head in confirmation of Ruri's story.

"And may I ask what that is for?" Inspector Megure pointed to the digital camera in Russel's hands.

"Just a camera. I wanted to take some pictures of the scenery to show to the rest of my pals. The nature view here is amazing." Russel informed the inspector.

"You don't mind if I go through your pictures, do you?"

Russel shook his head as he nonchalantly handed Inspector Megure the camera.

"Nothing suspicious here." Kogoro whispered to his former superior as he peeked over the inspector's shoulder to examine the pictures much to the inspector's chagrin.

Despite Kogoro's presence, Megure continued on through the examination. As Russel said, he had taken pictures of the nature scene when he went out. The nature pictures soon came to an end when Megure went back one picture too many and came across an interesting picture.

"And this is?" Inspector Megure inquired about the picture in the camera.

"Oh, that's from last night." Russel answered. "I took a lot of pictures from the party last night. I was going to print them out and give them to the others after we leave."

"That's right. Nicholas-san was quite enthusiastic about today's party." Ruri commented. "He wanted to make it perfect, but now with what happened to Takano-san. He'll be devastated once he hears about this."

Inspector Megure didn't feel sad the same way Russell and Ruri felt sad, nor did Megure believe they really were sad. Maybe if this was only a case of drugs or theft the inspector could feel sorry for them but with the killer still out there he could only look at them and remember their truths and lies.

"And this 'Nichola-san' he's one of your companions, is that correct?" Megure inquired.

"That's right, he's one our coworkers." Russel answered.

"Then I suppose he's the one who organized this party?"

"No, that was Rose-san." Ruri added. "We came up with the idea of setting up a party as a group while Rose was the one who organized the whole thing and set up the reservation."

"Inspector, you don't think that Rose woman pretended to cooperate while planning the victim's death. It is fishy how she took on the trouble of setting up the trip." Kogoro whispered into the inspector's ear as they interview Rose and Russel.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Mouri-kun."

There was still much that they had to unravel first.

"Inspector!" A forensics member calls out to Inspector Megure. "We've found a strange bruise mark around the victim's left ankle."

"What?"

"Yes, a large hand shaped bruise was found. We speculate that he was grabbed by someone in that area."

"Then the culprit must be a man! Only a man would have a strong enough grip to do such a thing. He probably dragged him from the original crime scene and moved him here by dragging him here to conceal the dastardly deed as an accident! Isn't that right, Inspector!" Kogoro hypothesized.

For once, Megure had to admit that what Kogoro said sounded very plausible compared to his usual nonsense.

"That's impossible, Oji-san." Conan interjected.

"Why you little... How many times have I told you not to interfere with police work!" Kogoro yelled at Conan.

_'That should be my line.'_ Inspector Megure wanted to say the same thing to his former subordinate but refrained from doing so.

"I mean look at him." Conan innocently points to the diseased. "He doesn't look like he was dragged around."

"He's right." The forensics member said. "We found numerous of injuries on the diseased's body, but they were all around the body. The back was heavily damaged or showed any signs of being dragged."

"Ack!" There goes Kogoro's idea.

"Not to mention, there isn't a path around here that showed signs of something being dragged here either." Conan added. "Also, the hand bruise belonged to a right hand so if the victim was dragged normally the criminal would use their left hand if they were dragging the victim by his left ankle. It'd be harder to drag the victim with his right hand in that case."


	8. Chapter 8

**I am definitely only going to send two more chapters into this story before it is completed. For the last chapters I didn't mention the help of my coauthor Kaede Tsukino. I thanked the coauthor before and will continue to do so every time I remember how much work was put in thanks to Kaede. **

XXX

If Conan said one more thing that made Kogoro look like a bad detective he was going to throw that kid into the water and drown him. Kogoro didn't care how close his daughter Ran and him were because a little boy solving an adult's case made him too angry to think straight.

"Then he was probably beaten up or tortured before he was finished off. What a sick and twisted criminal!" Kogoro concurred. "And based on the hand print shaped bruise, it's likely the culprit is a man. It's impossible for a woman have such a strong grip."

"It's still too soon to say that, Oji-san. We have yet to confirm where those injuries came from." Conan pointed out.

A large vein pops on Kogoro's head.

"Shut up!" Kogoro grabs Conan by the back of his collar and throws off somewhere. "You're disrupting our investigation. Go somewhere else!"

Sheesh. Just because he couldn't think up some decent ideas doesn't mean he can take it out on him... wasn't what Conan wanted to say but refrained from doing so.

Anyway, the mystery of where those wounds came from still bothered Conan. It doesn't seem like he'll be able to thoroughly investigate the location the body was found with Kogoro and the police there. Considering that the body was found near a river, it is possible the body was drifting in the river before it was found meaning that the real location of the crime scene could be elsewhere.

Walking upstream beside a river was the same as walking up a mountain. The surface was flat near the water, since they were near a beach there was no signs of rocks near the water, and unlike a family hike doing it alone was slower than going upstream together with friends or family.

Going upstream wasn't the only problem Conan had to think about. He was looking for a body and a murderer. Maybe the murderer knew what the police would do or how clever just one of police (in this case Conan) would be.

Conan's search soon comes to a dead end when he sees a waterfall at the end of the river.

_ 'A waterfall?'_ Did that mean that the victim's death was accidental then? If so, then what was that weird bruise on his leg? Did he get that prior to his demise or did it occur during the process? For now, there were still many questions left unanswered so whether this case was an accident or a murder is still unsolved at this point.

Judging from the height unless you had mountain climbing gear, it'd be dangerous climbing up the hard earth.

!

'_This is!'_

At the edge of the end of the waterfall, Conan saw something that caught his eye. From the looks of it, it was a flashlight. And quite broken up he might add.

It'd be too much of a coincidence if someone had 'happened' to have lost a flashlight when a murder had occurred. Chances are that the flashlight most likely belonged to the victim or the culprit.

If he asks the forensics to check, he'll be able to determine whether it was simply a lost property or an important clue to the case. And if this does belong to the victim, then this just proves that the real scene of the crime was here after all.

The only issue was where?

If it was dragged along the river current, then the location should be somewhere upstream as the body flowed downstream the river.

Having finished his surveillance of the area, Conan went back to take the flashlight to the forensics. All he had to do was wait for the results until then he'll just do a bit more investigation on the individuals involved with the victim.

Or he was going to until he unexpectedly ran into a familiar face.

"Long time no see..." Yoru greeted Conan. "It must be fate or destiny for the both us to come here on vacation and run into a case in the same place."

"..."

"Regardless of what your suspicions are of me or what you think of me, we are in the midst of an important case." Yoru said. "I take it you want to interview the prime suspects too. But unfortunately, Inspector Megure is already in the middle of that right now. No children allowed in or at least that's what that shoddy, mustache man detective said."

'_Oji-san...'_ Conan sweat dropped.

"Relax, I already prepared a back up plan. Before I left, I made sure to install a bug in the room, but whether you'll trust me and listen is completely up to you." Yoru made sure to give his father a listening device so that he could hear the entire interview. There was a possibility of his father delivering him wrong information, and he couldn't take that chance.

What could Yoru possibly do with Conan. He didn't ask Conan but he looked like the kind of kid who could find clues by himself; telling him how he bugged the room might have been a mistake.

Looking at this, it was the perfect opportunity to gain more information on the case. But the issue was the person giving him the opportunity. What could he have gained by letting him have this chance? Moreover, this already revealed that he was no ordinary kid as no ordinary kid would plant a bug in a room to listen in on the conversation in the room. But most of all, can he really trust him well enough to go along with his deal.

No matter. He needed to listen in the suspects' statements and alibis so there wasn't much choice in the matter.

The two began to listen in the on interviews through the earbuds.

From the other room, they could hear Inspector Megure beginning the interview.

"First, we'll start with your relationships with the victim." Inspector Megure started.

"Yes, we all work for the same company so we're coworkers." Nicholas spoke up for his friends. "I've known Takano for some time, but I never knew he'd end up carelessly getting into an accident like this."

"Accident? How do you know that his death was an accident?" Inspector Megure suspiciously inquired. "We've only verified his death but haven't confirmed it to be murder or an accident."

"That's because last night he was really drunk during our party. We left him alone a while, but when I came back to our room he was already gone so I assumed he had either gone to the baths or took a walk. He often had a hobby of taking a walk after dinner. And I noticed that my flashlight was gone so I thought he mistook his for mine with him being drunk and all. I didn't think much of it so I went to bed. Then the next morning, I heard people talking about someone dying. I didn't know it was Takano until Russel and Ruri told us. So I assumed his death was an accident considering how dead drunk he was last night."

His story does make sense. It wouldn't be odd to hear about a drunkard dying in unfortunate accident. That does happen.

They pretty much are just playing with their lives when they get drunk in the first place. There was no words about what to call the changes in the brain but there is a word for the people who consume too much alcohol: drunkards and drunks.

The problem was some people just don't look at murder happening as simply as that.

"Inspector, it is likely that it was an accident or possibly a murder under the disguise of an accident." Kogoro whispered to Megure which didn't go unheard by the two buggers.

"They're both plausible, but we have yet to confirm that." Megure whispered back.

Moving on back to the questioning, Inspector Megure proceeded back where he left off.

"What time was it when you noticed that the victim was missing?" Inspector Megure asked.

"Around 10 last night when I came back from the baths." Nicholas answered. "I saw him still there at 9."

"Wait, you took a bath for an hour?!" Kogoro stated in disbelief. Sure, he liked the baths here, but one hour was kind of long.

"No, it was only probably for thirty minutes or so. I met up with Rose on my way to the baths. She was on her way there too. So I asked if she wanted to have a drink our baths. We chatted for a bit after our baths and headed back to our rooms."

'_So that's what those drinks were...'_ Conan remembered seeing Rose briefly before he and Ran went to take their baths. But it was odd, Conan remembered seeing Rose carry several drinks rather than just two. If Nicholas's story was true, then why did she buy more than just two unless it was for the rest of their friends. If so, then the number of drinks matched up. However based on Nicholas's story, it was only just the two of them. Something didn't add up.

No wait, Conan and Ran didn't go to the baths until around 8 so then what were those drinks for?

"Ms. Miller, can you describe the events last night from your side?" Inspector Megure asked.

"Yes..." Rose answered quite shaken up by the current events. "L-Last night, we were celebrating a dear friend's birthday. During the party, Takano-san drank too much alcohol and became intoxicated. He stayed like that the whole time and kept on muttering several strange things. Everyone started feeling thirsty so I went out to buy some drinks."

_'That's what those were for...'_ So she actually bought drinks for the whole group and then a couple with Nicholas after the baths.

"When I came back, I gave everyone their drink and left Takano-san's drink on the table since he looked like he was in a deep sleep from the alcohol. We cleaned up a bit. Russel and I left a bit earlier to take our baths since Nicholas and Ruri said that they only had just a little bit more clean up. I had forgotten something in my room so back to get it."

"Oh? And just what was this that you forgot?" Kogoro inquired. He found it suspicious how Rose had conveniently forgotten something in her room the night of the murder/ accident in question.

"Uhm, it's kind of embarrassing so..." Rose's face slightly flushed a little as she began to fidget around. Something that Kogoro found suspicious.

"Surely, it wasn't anything related to this incident... For instance, a murder weapon?"

Now he was just being plain forward. Inspector Megure couldn't help but sweat drop at Kogoro's forwardness. Detective Satou and Takagi too. Even Conan too couldn't help but sweat drop either.

'_Oji-san...'_

"I-It's not!" Rose immediately denied.

"Then what was it?!" Kogoro further inquired.

"Like I said, it's embarrassing!"

"Trying to play innocent aren't we... Unfortunately, you can't fool this great detective's eyes! Now what was it that you forgot!"

"MY UNDERWEAR!" Rose blurted out in completely embarrassment unable to handle the pressure any more.

Eh?

"I was heading to the baths with Russel when I remembered that I didn't have any spare undergarments so I went back to my room to get them." Rose admitted covering her completely flushed face with her hands.

"Mouri-kun..." was all Inspector Megure could say.

_ 'Oji-san...'_ He did it again.

Kogoro was going to interview Russell. Generally it was hard for people to answer interviews and all Kogoro would find out was how difficult he was going to be.

" Did you see anything? I know you were heading to the baths. You were alone though because your friend forgot her undergarments. I am also going to ask if you had anything to do with her not having her undergarments."

"That's plain sexual harassment! How could you make her say that out loud?!" Russel criticized Kogoro followed by Ruri as Nicholas comforts their friend.

"That's right. Even if you're police, you shouldn't just force someone to say such things!"

"Mouri-kun..." Inspector Megure said as Kogoro sheepishly scratched the back of his head.

To make things worse for Kogoro, the last person he wanted to see showed up. "Really, just what are you doing? Aren't you supposed to be some 'great detective' as you say you are..."

Eri gives Rose her card.

"Call me if you ever feel like settling things on court. I'll be more than happy to be of help." Eri added much to Kogoro's chagrin.

Lightning sparks between both husband and wife as they glare at each other.

"Now. Now. You two." Megures tries to pacify the two.

XXXXXXXX

Meanwhile, as for a couple of eavesdropping detectives, Yoru just had one thing to say to Conan.

"Is this guy really a detective?"

Conan sometimes wondered the same thing too.

"Hearing this makes you wonder how he even became one in the first place..."

XXXXXXXX

Moving on, Megure continues with the interview as he asks Russel for his side of the story.

"And what about you?"

Russel first had a look on his face that he was trying to be scary and that if he had a flashlight he would use it to show Megure how scary his face looked. Russel started to change his behavior though as being scary wasn't a good idea during an interview.

" I was on my way with Rose to the baths. It would have been a nice evening if she went away to get back those sundries or whatever belonging to her. It wasn't just sundries though and we were laughing about one thing." Russel rubbed his check as Megure saw his face blush a little when he mentioned his part.

"After I finished my bath, I went back to our room to check up on Nicholas and Ruri to see if they were done yet but didn't see either of them there so I thought they had finished already. Come to think of it. I didn't see Takano either." Russel didn't remember seeing the drunk in the room when they went to check up on his two companions. "Then I went to read a book in the lobby where I met Ruri and we played some ping pong. Not later did Nicholas and Rose showed up. I played for a while and went to sleep. I don't remember seeing Takano in our room when we got back so I didn't know where he went after I left to take a bath."

Accepting Russel's story, Inspector Megure moves onto the next suspect, Ruri Blythe.

"Ms. Blythe, if you please."

"Okay, let's see..." Ruri began trying to recollect last night's events. "After Rose and Russel left, it was just Nicholas and I left. It didn't take long for us to finish cleaning. Nicholas took all the trash we collected to give to an employee while I organized the room. Not long after Nicholas left, Takano-san woke up. He looked quite intoxicated so I recommended some hangover medicine for him, but he insisted that he was fine. So I reminded him that we were supposed to go hiking today and couldn't have him troubling the others if he wasn't feeling well tomorrow. Thankfully, he complied and went to get some medicine. And that was the last time I saw Takano-san. As for the rest, I went to take a bath and played ping pong with the others."

The problem with Ruri Blythe's story as well as the others was the last time they saw them could have been when one of them or all of them killed him. It was a dumb idea to go on but it came from Inspector Megure's head so even if he was wrong he would go by it blaming the closest friends

"Inspector Megure!" A forensics member barges in with the broken flashlight he received from Conan in a zip-lock bag. "I've brought the results of the analysis."

"Very well, and what are they?" Inspector Megure inquired.

The forensics member walks over to Megure and whispers over to him, "According to our analysis, we've found the victim's fingerprints as well as Mr. Nicholas Fay's. And we've estimated the time to be between 1:00 - 3:00 PM."

Processing the new information he received, that would mean that from 1:00 - 3:00 PM one of them most likely committed the possible crime of murder. However they have yet to determine whether it was an accident or a murder.

"And what were you people doing from the time 1:00 - 3:00 PM?" Megure questioned.

"Sleeping obviously." Nicholas rebutted. "Neither me nor Russel saw Takano by the time we went to bed."

Russel nodded his head in confirmation at Nicholas's story.

Megure had the sudden instinct in his head that asking a question now would complicate him trying to prove who the murderer is. It was all unlikely. He was trying and he was staring and the way he looked didn't mean he could get everyone who did it because of an accident out of his head; entirely clueless and desperate for good results he wanted to use something-anything at the scene-to make the eyes of the murderer blink.

XXXXXXXX

Based on the information he had just received, it was still too early to determine whether the information the case was an accident or a murder. Still, it did prove to give an adequate amount of information. So far, he's got the background of the suspects, their alibis, and the time frame of the victim's death. At that hour, it's difficult to confirm whether they were actually asleep or not since anyone of them could have snuck out of their room at any time.

"Looks like you're stumped." Yoru remarked. "Since we've come this far might as well enlighten you a bit on this case. And maybe you might find the answer to this case before me."

This got Conan's full attention. Was this the reason why Yoru helped him eavesdrop on the suspects' questioning? Was he testing him? Or maybe challenge him? Well, Conan wasn't one to turn down a challenge when it came to deducing cases.

"Last night, I met with one of the suspects, Rose Miller. To be more specific, we ran into each other. I was feeling ill at the time and was running a cold. When we collided, the medicine I was carrying spilled onto the floor. I'm not sure if it was luck or not that they were in pill form so I didn't have to worry about any liquid stains. She offered to help me, but I declined and picked them all up by myself. Now here's the strange part, in the middle of the night, I felt thirsty so I went to get a drink of water, but when I returned back to my room, I felt someone staring at me. Since I was ill at the time, I could find out who it was since they were gone by the time I turned around."

*cough* *cough*

Yoru begins to cough showing that he was still a little under the weather.

"Hey, you should rest. You're still sick."

"I'm fine. There's still a case to be solved. Until I find the answer, I'm not resting."


	9. Chapter 9

**Final chapter of the fanfiction. It was fun writing this fanfiction and I'm glad I finally managed to finish it. Thank you Kaede Tsukino for all your help finishing this fanfiction. Hopefully I'll make more mystery fanfictions in the future.  
**

XXX

It was a good thing Yoru decided not to rest. It wasn't a good thing for a person's help after they are known to be sick and don't try to be well rested to get better, but for a hard working detective and child prodigy like Yoru avoiding rest was giving his enemies a reason to fear him.

"Mama, hurry! Hurry!" A little boy urged his mother as he ran.

"Hiro, don't run like that! It's dangerous!" The little boy's mother chided following her son not too far from behind.

"It's fine. It's fine. Uwwaaahhhh!" Not noticing a box nearby, the little boy named Hiro accidentally tripped over the box and was about to hit the floor. That is until his mother grabs his arm just in time.

"See. I told you not to run. It's dangerous."

"Sorry, Mama."

At that moment, it came to Conan and Yoru. The trick behind the victim's death and the mystery behind the victim's strange hand shaped bruise on his ankle they finally figured it out. Now all that's left was to set up the stage and unveil the truth behind this sorrowful tale.

A smirk slowly forms on the two's face upon their finding.

"You wouldn't by chance happen to be thinking of the same thing as me...?" Yoru asks Conan.

"Yeah, and I happen to know who did it too."

"What a coincidence. Me too."

*cough* *cough* *cough*

But before he could do anymore, Yoru soon breaks out in a coughing fit and collapses on the ground.

Eventually, he was taken to his room by his father when the staff had informed his father of his condition. Conan was concerned about Yoru's health but knew that he had more important matters to attend to.

Conan wasn't going to try explaining how he solved the case this time because he couldn't take all the credit. Using a simple piece of technology that sticks in the ear so a person can hear what the other has to say Conan contemplated letting Rin's father get all the credit. He was carrying the technology, but he didn't think he needed to let anyone else have it.

' _There's no time to think about this,'_ Conan told himself. '_ I just need to remind myself I can think ahead of a murderer...can I afford to help anyone this time?'_

XXXXXXXX

Yoru felt like their was a dog sleeping on his foot. Being sick made his father sleeping with a book stretched out on Yoru's foot feel like a big animal.

In another room, Conan had already set up everything he needed for the deduction. He put Kogoro to sleep, his bow tie was set to Kogoro's voice, and he kept himself hidden while everyone's eyes were on the sleeping detective. Now all that's left was to wait for Inspector Megure to bring the suspects in.

"Mouri-kun, what did you call us for this time... Oh! It can't be!" Inspector Megure exclaimed in surprise upon laying his eyes on the sleeping figure on the chair.

"It's here!" Takagi added.

"It can't be... the Sleeping Kogoro!"

"That famous detective!"

Nicholas and Ruri both expressed their surprise to see that the annoying detective was actually the famous detective, the Sleeping Kogoro.

"Looks like all the actors are in place. So let us begin this tragic screen play." Conan spoke in Kogoro's voice through the voice changing bow tie.

"So you know who did it? So it was murder after all!" Megure said.

"Now, now, Inspector. Let's take things slowly right now. Surely, we'll all the answer to that once this is all done. First, I received some very crucial information from Conan who received a testimony from our guest detective's son."

All eyes lock on Yoru's father.

"According to his son, he had a little run in with Ms. Miller while he was retrieving some cold medicine. And late last night, he went out to get a glass of cold water but felt someone staring at him when he came back to his room."

"Hold it! You can't say it was Rose just because of that! So Rose bumped into a kid that doesn't mean she was the one following the kid!"

"Even if she did, it doesn't even have anything to do with this case!"

Both Nicholas and Russel rebuked in defense of their friend.

"I wouldn't say that it doesn't have anything to do with this case. Upon hearing the kid's testimony, I had forensics do an inspection on Yoru's medicine."

"As per Mouri-san's instructions, we did a check up on the pills and found multiple fingerprints on one pill in particular that didn't belong to the child, Yoru. The late victim, Mr. Daichi Takano, and Ms. Rose Miller's"

Yoru could see further ahead to see a policeman carrying a bag of pills walking towards him. It didn't take lots of brain power for Yoru to deduce this officer was giving him his pills. Sure enough, when the police officer made it to Yoru he held the bag out to him.

" Your father says he couldn't find your pills so he asked me to look for them. I believe these pills belong to you."

" Oh. Are you sure they don't belong to someone else?"

"Now then Ms. Miller, can you please explain how a pill with both the victim's and your fingerprints got on it?" Conan questioned but only got a silent reply. "And with further investigation, it was found that this particular pill was much different from the rest of the medicine. Or rather that it was made differently not something that you'd find in a regular pharmacy."

"Wait? So you're saying that Rose killed Takano for that?" Nicholas interjected. "That's ridiculous! There's no way she'd do something that inhumane!"

"That's right! Rose isn't the type of person to do that! In the first place, she and Takano weren't even in the same division so that pill would be meaningless to her!" Russel added.

"But I never said that she was the one who killed to get this pill as there was yet another set of fingerprints found." Conan enlightened the two IT workers.

"Another?" Ruri repeated.

"That's right. One that didn't belong to anyone in this room."

"But what does that have to do with anything?" Nicholas asked.

"Because it belonged to someone that you people knew very well and the reason why you're here."

"Wait, you don't mean..." A cold sweat drops down from Nicholas cheek as Russel and Ruri both turned pale.

"That's right. It belonged to your late colleague, Mr. Todd Fianschel."

Now this caught Inspector Megure's attention as well as Detective Takagi and Detective Satou's attention. For they had also known about the death regarding the late Todd Fianschel. "Mouri-kun, you don't mean!"

"That's right, Inspector. That pill was originally developed and made by none other than the late Todd Fianschel who was murdered by Mr. Daichi Takano."

The two friends point of view and respect didn't change because all the facts showed she was fighting for her life. The only thing they didn't count on was Rose standing up, rubbing her forehead, and about to tell Conan the confession he wanted to hear.

"That's right. It was me. I killed Takano-san." Rose admitted with her head head hung down and her eyes hidden under her bangs. "I couldn't allow Todd's work to fall into that man's hands. Not after what he did to Todd just to steal Todd's hard work."

"Rose..." Ruri and the rest of their friends couldn't believe what they were hearing. It was as if time had froze when all life drained from their faces.

"I can't hide it anymore. You can take me away." Rose held up her both of her hands together ready to be cuffed.

"Takagi..." One word from his overweight superior was enough for Takagi.

Just as Takagi was about to handcuff Rose, Conan had cut in.

"Wait, Detective Takagi. Are you sure you want to hastily handcuff her like that?"

"But Mouri-san, didn't she just confess to killing the victim, Takano-san?"

"Yes, she did. But that's only from her perspective."

"What do you mean, Mouri-kun?" Inspector Megure inquired.

"Do you remember the condition of the victim's body when he was found and the location he was found?"

"Yes, when we found it in the river, we found countless of bruises and injuries on the body mostly likely from the culprit who held a grudge against the victim. And from Ms. Rose's confession, there shouldn't be any better motive than her's. Is there something wrong with that?"

"Very. Because of one important detail that we overlooked, we made an incorrect assumption."

"What do you mean?" Megure asked.

"Ah!" Detective Satou exclaimed in realization. "The river! The corpse was most likely swept away by the river's current and was found by chance at that location which we assumed was the murder location."

"That's right. The place that we assumed where the victim died was incorrect."

"Then where did the real murder scene?"

"Inspector, did you know that if you walk upstream the river, you'll find a high waterfall with a steep incline?"

"You don't mean!"

"That's right. It was at the top of the waterfall where the cliff was that the victim fell to his doom."

"I see that would explain the numerous bruises and injuries over his body. Most likely from when he fell."

" There's no gentle way of putting that dying from a fall like that could only have made the bruise with sharp point sticking into his arm. It could have felt like thirty six spears ripping inside the muscles...if he was conscious when he died the pain would have felt cold and bleeding."

"Rose, you pushed Takano?" Nicholas shakily said in disbelief.

Rose's silent response had only worsened Nicholas's unease.

Russel and Rose too couldn't believe it in their heart that their kindhearted friend could do such a thing like murder even if it was for their friend. But in their hearts, they knew that they couldn't blame their friend for her actions as they too would have most likely done the same thing if they knew about Todd's death.

"I think you people are getting the wrong idea. Remember what I said before. It's still too soon to assume that Ms. Rose is a killer. In addition to the numerous of injuries over the victim's body, there was one particular injury that stuck out the most." Conan interjected.

"The hand-shaped bruise on the victim's left ankle!" Takagi exclaimed.

"That's right. Don't you find it odd how a man who had fallen down a cliff such a bruise. No matter how you see it, it would be impossible for a man to get such a bruise if he had been pushed."

"Mouri-kun, what are you getting at?" Megure inquired.

"Inspector, if you were walking by a river with Detective Takagi and accidentally slipped on a wet rock, what would you unintentionally do in that situation?"

"I'd probably try to grab onto something so that I wouldn't end up falling on the ground like a... natural reaction. It can't be, Mouri-kun!" Inspector Megure finally understood where Mouri or rather Conan was getting at.

"That's right. The one who was actually pushed wasn't the victim but rather the suspect." At Conan's statement, the entire room went silent. The person whom they thought was the perpetrator was actually the victim. And the person whom they thought was the victim was actually the culprit. "And on instinct, the first thing, Ms. Rose did was to grab onto something so that she wouldn't fall to her death and unintentionally the first thing she happened to grab onto was Mr. Takano."

"That would explain the bruise on the diseased's leg!" Detective Satou added.

"How come she's fine if she fell along with the diseased?" Detective Takagi asked.

"Simple, if you checked the scene of the diseased's death, you'd notice a tree growing on the side of the cliff. One sturdy enough to hold the weight of a human body."

"I see so the diseased called out to Ms. Rose and tried to kill her at the waterfall by making it seem like an accident to silence her about their late colleague's death and his crime. Luckily, Ms. Rose was fortunate enough to land on a tree while the diseased wasn't so fortunate." Inspector Megure explained.

"No, you're wrong. It was me who called him out there." Rose admitted. "I wanted him to turn himself in, but..."

Rose didn't need to finish her sentence to let them know what she was going to say.

" He rather kill you than let the whole world know he's a murderer, acted you first where you surprisingly had enough self defense to keep him away, and then you both fell. This wasn't a case of murder or an accident...it all has to do with self defense."

Once the situation was brought to light, Rose was escorted to a police car to have her statement of both Todd and Takano's cases recorded.

Conan breathed a sigh of relief. At last, it was finally over.

"What are you doing?" Detective Satou yelled at Takagi.

"I'm so sorry. It was an accident. I didn't think we'd need it!"

"It's important evidence! How could we not!"

"What's going on?" Conan curiously asked wondering what Detective Satou was scolding Detective Takagi for.

"Ah, Conan-kun." Detective Satou said taking notice of Conan's presence. "You wouldn't believe what this guy did. He just carelessly gave that private detective the pill the deceased Todd Fianschel created by mistake when he asked for the cold medicine we took for forensics. His son's condition was getting worse so he needed the medicine took for analysis, but instead, this clumsy detective ended up giving him the wrong medicine."

Detective Satou accusingly glanced at Detective Takagi.

"I said I was sorry! But we've already got Ms. Rose's testimony so it should be fine." Detective Takagi defended.

"Even so, it's completely unprofessional of you to make such a careless mistake like that." Detective Satou childishly rebuked.

"Couldn't you just ask for the pill back?" Conan asked.

"We would if we could, but that private detective already gave it to his son so we can't exactly get it back." Detective Satou said.

Curious about Yoru's condition, Conan went ahead to check on the boy to see how he was fairing. The last time they met, he didn't look so good so Conan was slightly worried about him.

Getting to Yoru's room was a frenzy. Conan imagined a war zone with lots of bloodshed and feathers blowing through the wind. Conan had the misfortune to talk to Yoru when an American carrying a Thanksgiving basket carrying things Conan knew but never understood and a quilt from South Africa. These people tend to get on other people's nerves but Conan was small so he could squeeze through him.

With no more distractions, Conan found an empty hallway leading to Yoru's room. He wondered if the kid was alright. There was so much he had to ask him like who he was. It was obvious that he was no ordinary kid like Conan. And if he was like Conan, then there was much he needed to discuss with him.

"Hey kid, it's dangerous running around the hallways like that." A voice from behind reprimanded Conan.

"Ah, sorry." It was pointless revealing his intentions to this stranger so Conan just decided to make up some excuse to get this guy off his back. "I needed to use the re—"

As soon as Conan turned around, he saw a very familiar face one that belonged to Yoru except the person in front of him was way taller than the Yoru he knew and much older most likely around high school age.

"You..."

"As expected of you, you can already tell. Yeah, it's me, Yoru Kurihara, a high school student turned into a kid like you. Although not anymore now."

Taking their conversation to a more private location, Conan learned of Yoru's past and his connection with the organization as well the unfortunate situation that lead to his predicament. As it turned out, that pill constructed by the late Todd Fianschel was the antidote to the poisonous drug APTX 4869 that reverted Yoru back to his normal form once he took it.

"I see." Tch, just when he thought he got a lead. It didn't do him much good. It was lucky that he found some lead to the antidote to his return him back to his normal body, but the information for the pill's composition was privately created by a research who is now dead so there was close to little to no information on attaining the cure. "So what are you going to do now?"

"I don't know about you, but I'm going back to my high school life. And I can't exactly let a dangerous organization like that run around now, can I?"

'This guy...'

"If you need anything, I'll be more than glad to help."

"Yeah, me too."

FIN~


End file.
